IBM Opens Up Own Data Stores for New Analytics Cloud
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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 immense 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 experience with intellectual property to work behind a new cloud service.
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.
Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
