IBM to Widen Use of Mainframes in China, Elsewhere
558343
Buoyed by brisk sales of its  mainframe computers in recent quarters, IBM is aiming to  broaden the use of the powerful machines, particularly in  China, the world's fastest growing large economy.
398755
Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE.
53200
(InfoWorld) - IBM is unveiling Thursday a new virtual tape drive management system for mainframes that compares to similar technology introduced last spring by rival Sun Microsystems. The IBM System Storage TS7700 Virtualization Engine is the successor to its TotalStorage Virtual Tape Server and offers increased capacity, faster processing speed and improved disaster recovery features. Because copying batches of data onto a tape is a time-consuming practice, tying up server operations, virtual storage systems save the data into a disk cache for transfer onto tape at a later time. The TS 7700 offers 6TB of disk cache storage capacity, a four-fold increase over the 1.5TB of cache in the previous model, said Cindy Grossman, vice president of IBM tape storage systems. An available 3:1 data compression ratio enhances capacity further. Also, because it operates in a grid computing environment, the 7700 can simultaneously copy data to two different tape storage sites for improved disaster recovery, said Grossman. Data can be "mirrored" to multiple sites and the system will know where to find it. IBM's announcement follows aÂ similar product launch from SunÂ by more than five months. In May that company refreshed its Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System, a tape drive manager also for mainframe environments, which also stores data in disk cache for later copying onto tapes and offers double the capacity and performance of its previous generation technology. SunÂ acquired StorageTekÂ in 2005. "These products tend to leapfrog over one another," said Mike Kahn an analyst with The Clipper Group, a research firm in Wellesley, Mass. Enterprises are looking for better utilization of their tape storage networks, including improved access to data on them, Kahn said. Storing data to a disk and then later to tape gives enterprises some storage flexibility. If an insurance company receives a claim form, it can save that on disk if it needs to retrieve it quickly while the claim is still active. But if a claim has been completed, that file can be copied onto tape. The virtual tape storage market for mainframe systems is a two-company market, of Sun and IBM, he said. The two companies last week each introduced new tape encryption technology one day apart.
523937
Information technology (IT) giant IBM is ready to grab more shares in the IT related market of China&#39;s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with more products at affordable prices.
717112
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- IBM has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on computer chips and double the performance of data-hungry processors by replacing a problematic type of memory with a variety that uses much less space on the slice of silicon.
61314
Ziff Davis - IBM next month will finish transitioning its core pSeries and iSeries server lines to the Power5 chip when it starts shipping three new high-end systems, two of which support as many as 64 processors.
336096
(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. is releasing more software to make it easier to program, manage and administer its mainframes in an ongoing bid to attract more customers to purchase its big iron hardware instead of high-end servers. The move is part of a five-year, $100 million project IBM began in October toÂ simplify use of its System z mainframe. At that time, IBM released a variety of tools and services including a new mainframe management console, better software asset management capabilities and Health Checker for z/OS, a monitoring and configuration tuning tool. The new enhancements IBM announced for its System z software Tuesday cover security, systems and data management and virtualization. The vendor made the announcements at the Share conference in Tampa, Florida. Turning 52 this year, Share, an independent IBM user group, is one of the world's oldest user associations. Both IBM and Share have been spearheading a number of initiatives in recent years designed to raise the profile of the mainframe. These include zNextGen, a project to get IT students interested in gaining mainframe expertise and then embarking on careers in big iron, which both organizations see as very important given that many skilled mainframe operators are reaching retirement age. As part of Tuesday's announcements, IBM unveiled a new version of its database -- DB2 9 for z/OS -- due out in the first half of this year along with a suite of DB2 tools. The vendor is also enhancing its Tivoli monitoring family of availability and performance management tools including Omegamon z/OS Management Console. IBM acquired the Omegamon technology through the June 2004 purchase of Candle. IBM has translated the Omegamon software into Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. Also new is z/VM version 5.3, an improved release of IBM's mainframe virtualization software with a focus on expanding the technology's scalability to host over 1,000 virtual images on a single hypervisor. The vendor has also worked on simplifying the management of Z/VM running on the Linux operating system. On the middleware side, IBM is releasing WebSphere Developer for System z version 7.0 and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository for z/OS version 6.0. Both offerings are designed to help users as they adopt the service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to development so they can more easily expose their mainframe data as Web services. Turning to security, IBM debuted the Consul zSecure Suite version 1.8 which enables z/OS users to create and review XML security audits on their mainframe data.Â The vendor acquired Consul in January to beef up the compliance and security auditing capabilities of its Tivoli systems management software and is working on integrating Consul's zSecure software with Tivoli. Â
490925
Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE.Mainframes like IBM&#39;s System z are integral to SOA almost by default because they contain a large portion of the world&#39;s business information, the study suggests. Thirty percent of respondents who work for companies with 10,000 or more employees said between 51 percent and 75 percent of their company&#39;s data is managed and stored on a mainframe, according to the study.Meanwhile, nearly 23 percent of respondents said their company is undergoing a SOA project, and another third said a SOA is in the planning or consideration stages.Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they are pursuing an enterprise-wide SOA, but in most cases, the projects are confined to niche instances, such specific lines of business or divisions or within applications.&quot;Many of the applications that need to be SOA-enabled are mainframe applications,&quot; said Pamela Taylor, vice president of strategic development for SHARE and a solutions architect for a subsidiary of a Fortune 50 company. &quot;System z tends to be absolutely critical to deployments.&quot;While mainframes play a dominant role in hosting an enterprise&#39;s data, companies&#39; interaction with that data faces constraints. At least 50 percent of the companies surveyed use hand-coded scripts to push mainframe-based data to other databases or platforms, according to the study. Such scripting is hard to maintain, particularly if the programmers who wrote it leave the organization, the study notes.IBM has aligned System z with SOA.The study notes that SOA can strain systems, such as through its use of XML-based messaging. &quot;Rather than acquire more server hardware to attempt to address growing SOA performance issues, mainframes may represent a more cost-effective option for leveraging existing resources,&quot; the study states.In turn, the abstraction layer a SOA provides can help enterprises more easily tap their existing mainframe applications and data, the study notes.Sales for System z fell last year but IBM is banking on the launch of its next-generation mainframe in February.Some 431 SHARE members responded to the survey, which was conducted by Unisphere Research. About 48 percent work for companies with 1,000 or more employees, and 26 percent of respondents&#39; firms have more than $1 billion in revenue.
27159
IBM next month will finish transitioning its core pSeries and iSeries server lines to the Power5 chip when it starts shipping three new high-end systems, two of which support as many as 64 processors.
606066
IBM is the latest storage giant to step up efforts to woo IT buyers, promising partitioning capabilities cribbed from its mainframe heritage, as well as space-saving formats and better server connectivity.
639115
InfoWorld - IBM Corp. is releasing more software to make it easier to program, manage and administer its mainframes in an ongoing bid to attract more customers to purchase its big iron hardware instead of high-end servers.
715766
Not doing a runner, though Tech giant IBM has inked a licensing agreement with Lenovo that will see the Chinese computer vendor making and selling a range of x86 servers.â¦
253306
(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. has set up a new application services facility in India's north-eastern state of West Bengal, in a city that has emerged as one of the country's key software and services hubs. The new facility is in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, and is equipped to have about 3,000 staff, a spokeswoman for IBM India said. She could not give a timeframe for the expansion. Kolkata has emerged as a center for IT services because of the surprisingly business-friendly policies of West Bengal's communist government. A number of multinational companies and Indian outsourcers, with bases in Bangalore, Mumbai or Delhi, have expanded to Kolkata in a bid to tap new pools of talent. IBM already has three other delivery centers in the city, and it's home to IBMâs second-largest pool of employees in India after Bangalore. The Armonk, New York, company announced in June that it isÂ investing $6 billion in IndiaÂ over the next three years. It's part of IBM's strategy to grow its presence inÂ emerging markets such as China and Brazil, because they offer vast pools of staff and also because they are attractive markets themselves. IBM had about 43,000 staff in India as of June. It has hired more staff since then for its software and business process outsourcing (BPO) operations in India, according to industry sources.
28608
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N) widened its lead last year in the U.S. market for Internet hosting services as it won a greater share of the medium-sized business market, according to data recently published by market research firm IDC.
338231
Officials announced the launch of an IBM Innovation Center in Beijing Thursday to find better ways to get software from ISVs (define) around the world into the computers of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in China.
123645
IBM is expanding and adding new technology to 11 of its data centers in North America, Europe and Asia to meet growing demand and rolled out new services to customers, the world's largest computer company said late on Thursday.
446600
IBM on Friday is scheduled to make available early versions of three grid-based technologies intended to help corporate and third-party developers better manage grid-based resources as a way to solve large and compute-intensive problems.