IBM Opens Up Own Data Stores for New Analytics Cloud (
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IBM is quickly establishing a new cloud
computing identity. On Nov. 16, it revealed what it calls "the largest
private cloud computing environment for business analytics in the world"
and pronounced it ready for prime time.
What IBM has done, and what no one else has
yet attempted, is this: Over decades, through its hundreds of thousands of
employees, it has researched and archived an enormous amount of information in
numerous vertical markets, garnered through solving innumerable
business-related IT problems.
So the company is now putting all that stored-up intellectual property to work
behind a new cloud service for use by IBM
internally and for its customers' use. The amount of data is estimated
conservatively to make up about a petabyte of digital storage.
IBM equates this mountain of information to
some 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text.
The part of this cloud for IBM's internal
use, called Blue Insight, is currently gathering and storing information from
about 100 corporate warehouses and data stores. It provides analytics on that
estimated petabyte (1,000 terabytes, or 1 million gigabytes) of data and turns
it into usable business information for IBM's
sales force and development communities.
Blue Insight is a sophisticated system that runs on a System Z10 mainframe
computer—one with 48 processors (32 processors for production, 18 processors
for development and test environments) and strong cryptography capable of
handing up to 10,000 secure transactions per second and providing redundant
backup support, Michael Bradshaw, IBM vice
president of Application and Infrastructure Management Optimization, told
eWEEK.
Blue Insight Is Foundation for Smart Analytics Cloud
To show customers how they can adapt this model into a system designed
specifically for themselves, IBM has
launched a new service package based on Blue Insight called the Smart Analytics
Cloud.
Combined with a customer's own data storage, Smart Analytics Cloud can extract
and analyze information from data
stores around the world to help users make good business decisions at the point
of sale and to predict and act immediately on business opportunities, Bradshaw
said.
IBM is now ready to sell the attributes of
the Smart Analytics Cloud to customers old and new.
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