IBM Introduces the Industry's Fastest One Terabyte Storage Tape Drive

IBM today introduced the industry’s fastest one terabyte (TB) storage tape drive, which will enable clients to protect and archive more information with less cost and less energy usage - the highest capacity and performance of any tape drive in the market.

The new IBM System Storage TS1130 Tape Drive will be able to store up to one TB of uncompressed data per tape cartridge and with a native data rate of 160 megabytes per second (MB/s), storage backups can be completed up to 54 percent faster than the previous generation drive.

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Equivalent to storing the text of one million books on a single tape cartridge, the IBM System Storage TS1130 Tape Drive is ideal for mid-sized to enterprise clients across financial, life sciences and public sector industries looking for massive data protection, compliance and archive solutions needed over the long term. Coupled with IBM’s tape virtualization offerings, large, scalable automation, and tape drive encryption, customers can benefit from the low cost of tape solutions that are highly secure, while simplifying the management of backup and archive operations.

"IBM is committed to tape storage as part of a tiered information infrastructure and today we offer the fastest, highest capacity drive in the market,” said Cindy Grossman, Vice President of Tape and Archive, IBM System Storage. “Tape storage is the most green and cost-effective form of data storage available, and the IBM TS1130 Tape Drive will enable clients to address their growing needs for affordable and robust data solutions by storing more data on fewer cartridges, which will save clients valuable time, space, energy and money."

The IBM System Storage TS1130 uses a high technology Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR) head design that leverages IBM's world-record achievement of developing a more sensitive read-write head for the magnetic tape system --- which results in fewer data read errors helping to provide outstanding data integrity and subsystem reliability. It also features a special head overcoat technology that helps increase the overall life expectancy of the product.

The TS1130 uses existing 3592 rewritable and WORM cartridges. It offers backwards compatibility with support for Gen 1, 2 and 3 formats supporting both read and write for Gen 2 and read only for Gen1 helping to protect media investments and lower costs.

The TS1130 Tape Drive also supports drive-based data encryption to help protect your data. The TS1130-based encryption and associated Encryption Key Manager component are supported in a wide variety of operating system environments.

IBM is number one in the world for branded total tape revenue share five years running and number one in branded enterprise drives and automation revenue (1). The IBM System Storage TS1130 Tape Drive is an important part of the information infrastructure strategy - delivering the availability, security, retention and compliance requirements that clients seek. This strategy maps directly to IBM’s New Enterprise Data Center model, which helps clients improve IT efficiency and facilitates the rapid deployment of new IT services for future business growth.

Pricing and Availability:

The new IBM System Storage TS1130 (GA) will be available worldwide on September 5, 2008 with a starting price of $39,050. IBM is also offering an upgrade from existing drives for $19,500 and backward media compatibility for investment protection.

The IBM System Storage TS1130 is available either direct from IBM or through IBM Business Partners.

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IBM Acquires Platform Solutions Inc

IBM today announced it has acquired Platform Solutions, Inc. (PSI), a privately held technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. PSI's technologies and employees will become part of the IBM System z business unit of the IBM Systems and Technology Group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

PSI's technologies and skills, along with its intellectual capital, will become part of IBM's long-term mainframe product engineering cycles and part of IBM's future product plans.

"IBM's strategy is to continually evolve our mainframe technology to help our clients tackle the most demanding business issues," said Anne Altman, General Manager, IBM System z. "We will continue to move the mainframe forward through both IBM innovation and by acquiring new technologies. We welcome Platform Solutions, Inc. and look forward to collaborating with them."

"We are pleased to become part of IBM, knowing IBM has the industry's most comprehensive vision for the future direction of enterprise computing, and has the requisite technologies to realize that vision," said Michael Maulick, President and CEO, Platform Solutions, Inc. "This acquisition makes the most sense for our companies -- to collaborate on future technology offerings and maximize our combined knowledge and skills for the benefit of IBM clients globally."

As part of this acquisition, both IBM and PSI dropped their respective claims against each other.

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IBM Acquires Storage Company Diligent Technologies

IBM today announced it has acquired Diligent Technologies, a privately held storage "de-duplication" technology company headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts with research and development located in Tel Aviv, Israel. Diligent's technologies and employees will become part of the IBM System Storage business unit of the IBM Systems and Technology Group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Diligent develops in-line data de-duplication software that is integrated with server and storage infrastructures to help organizations significantly reduce the amount and cost of physical storage required in data centers. Enterprise and mid-sized organizations are faced with data centers that are reaching a breaking point of complexity and manageability, while at the same time experiencing explosive demands for storage for new data, transactions, email and back-up files.

Data de-duplication is an emerging technology that organizations are investing in today and Diligent's innovative technology provides a single solution to support data protection, archive and data-retention applications -- all while maintaining the integrity of the data.

The Diligent acquisition will be an important part of IBM's New Enterprise Data Center model, which helps clients improve IT efficiency and facilitates the rapid deployment of new IT services for future business growth. The new model is based on best practices for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.

Research indicates that organizations are increasingly investing in data de-duplication solutions for e-mail, database and other storage-intensive and mission-critical applications. According to a recent study (Wave 10 Storage Study, November 2007, TheInfoPro) of 152 Fortune 1000 enterprises by TheInfoPro, 56 percent of those surveyed spent more on data de-duplication in 2007 when compared to 2006, and that increased spending trend is expected to continue in 2008.

For years, IBM has been helping clients manage their information infrastructure with solutions that help address information availability, data retention, and security requirements. The acquisition of Diligent maps to the overall IBM enterprise strategy of developing more efficient, cost effective data centers and will further extend IBM's industry leading storage portfolio.

Combined with IBM, Diligent's data de-duplication technology and solutions will:

• address the unique data de-duplication requirements of enterprise clients for maximum in-line performance, scalability and data integrity;

• complement clients' installed backup/recovery applications (e.g. Tivoli Storage Manager and others);

• reduce the amount of time required to backup and recover information;

• enable the economical electronic transmission of back-up and archive data from primary to remote disaster recovery sites;

• reduce the amount of physical storage required to help reduce costs and energy consumption

"Diligent's data de-duplication software is a critical technology that will be integrated into the IBM Storage portfolio to further extend our information infrastructure strategy, allowing our clients to eliminate redundant data and streamline the infrastructure required to support their business -- which can result in dramatic improvements in data center efficiency," said Andy Monshaw, general manager, IBM System Storage. "Diligent's industry-proven data de-duplication offerings are exceptionally suited for mid-range and enterprise clients, uniquely combining in-line performance, scalability and data integrity and extends IBM's strong portfolio of strategic offerings that will help our clients reduce infrastructure costs, improve energy efficiency in the data center, and enable them to fully utilize their information on demand."

Diligent will become part of the IBM System Storage brand of offerings.

"We are pleased to become a key member of the IBM System Storage family, knowing IBM has the industry's most comprehensive vision for the future direction of storage and data-protection. Moreover, IBM has the requisite technologies in order to realize that vision. The combination of IBM and Diligent will deliver increased innovation and industry-focused data protection solutions," said Doron Kempel, Chairman and CEO, Diligent. "Our customers will significantly benefit as our talented teams and our storage technology advancements merge with IBM's innovative research and development group and world-wide reach in sales, service, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution. With IBM, Diligent's data de-duplication technology has the best opportunity to make a significant impact in the industry, on behalf of the end-users."

This is the third storage related acquisition for IBM in the past few months. In January, IBM formally announced it had acquired Israeli-based XIV to address emerging storage opportunities such as Web 2.0 applications, digital archives and digital media. Earlier this month, IBM announced its intent to acquire FilesX, a leading provider of continuous data protection software for mission-critical applications and remote offices.

IBM has industry recognized leadership in storage and server hardware and software, and has made several strategic storage-related acquisitions recently in addition to XIV and FilesX, including Arsenal, NovusCG, and Softek. Already the industry leader in storage services, IBM continues to grow its storage services offerings and presents customers with strategic solutions to deliver integrated software, storage and server hardware, services and research in standardized offerings that can be used by customers of all sizes to help them transform their businesses.

IBM's acquisition of Diligent supports the IBM growth strategy and capital allocation model, as part of the company's overall objective for earnings-per-share growth through 2010.

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IBM Signs Agreement to Acquire FilesX

IBM today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire FilesX, a privately held storage software company based in Newton, Mass., and Haifa, Israel, that specializes in continuous data protection and nearly instant data and application recovery software for enterprises and remote/branch offices. The acquisition is expected to close shortly. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The proliferation of data and information across the distributed enterprise are causing businesses of all sizes to seek better data recovery and information risk management solutions. FilesX products help address this need by delivering continuous data protection and fast recovery of business critical applications and servers running on Microsoft Windows platforms. Following close, IBM intends that the FilesX technology will become part of the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) family of products, IBM’s flagship suite of leading data protection and information infrastructure offerings, with proven compatibility in customer environments today.

FilesX enterprise-level continuous data protection solutions would complement IBM's existing file-based software called IBM Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files, which is targeted at SMB customers and individual PC users.

With its patented technology, FilesX helps IT staff restore data from virtually any type of failure and from nearly any point in time. Ease-of-use and self-managing features make FilesX offerings particularly attractive in environments where IT skills and budgets are limited.

For IT managers dealing with the pressures of data growth, and for chief compliance officers seeking better data controls, the acquisition should enable IBM to offer an end-to-end data protection solution from laptops to remote/branch offices, data centers and disaster recovery sites. Across the enterprise, customizable data protection features in both disk-based and tape-based environments are designed to improve data governance and provide nearly continuous user access to data even in the face of IT disruptions.

“The FilesX acquisition would complement IBM’s vision of enterprise data protection by adding critical capabilities for remote offices, delivering continuous data protection for applications and servers, and supporting business user needs with nearly instantaneous recovery of data,” said Al Zollar, general manager, Tivoli software, IBM. “It would also reinforce IBM’s mid-market strategy by adding a simple and easy to use full data protection solution – one that also is attractive to enterprise remote offices and departmental situations.”

FilesX has more than 100 customers in the United States and Israel, spanning government, education, healthcare, financial services and manufacturing. “Following the close of the transaction, the combination of FilesX' strong data protection and recovery software with IBM’s existing storage management products will enable customers to better safeguard their most critical information,” said Jimmy Garcia-Meza, FilesX CEO. “FilesX customers can benefit from the broad resources IBM has committed to growing the storage management part of its business, and will continue to receive support under their existing agreements."

Beyond the expanded data and application protection that the FilesX acquisition would provide, existing IBM customers would see no change to their current TSM environment, product set or support.

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IBM Unleashes World's Fastest UNIX System

IBM yesterday announced two high-end Power Systems models -- the world's fastest UNIX® server and a unique water-cooled supercomputer. The new systems offer sophisticated IBM virtualization technology and energy-saving capabilities to help dramatically reduce bottom-line operating costs, such as those for energy, floor space and systems management, while improving system performance, helping customers transition to a new enterprise data center.

The new UNIX enterprise server, the Power™ 595, designed to extend IBM's leadership in the UNIX market, will be attractive to existing IBM clients as well as Sun Solaris and HP UNIX users. For example, IBM's Power enterprise 64-core server delivers twice the performance at a comparable price as a similarly configured HP Superdome Itanium® system.

IBM's new POWER6 "Hydro-Cluster" supercomputer, the Power 575, is built to help users tackle some of the world's most challenging problems in fields such as energy, aerospace and weather modeling. The new super-dense system, representing a breakthrough in green IT, uses a unique, in-rack, water-cooling system and with 448 processor cores per rack offers users nearly five times the performance and more than three times the energy efficiency of its predecessor, IBM's POWER5+™ processor-based p575 supercomputer. (See additional press release on IBM Power 575)

Beginning today, customers will be able to leverage the world's most powerful microprocessor, POWER6 -- with new world-record speeds of up to 5 GHz -- in these new systems, leading to significant performance improvements across a wide array of applications. These advanced processors deliver two-to-three times the performance per core of comparable HP or Sun processors. And significant energy conservation design improvements enable POWER6 to deliver twice the performance requiring nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it as its POWER5™ predecessor.

These offerings are an important element in helping clients develop a new enterprise data center, which offers dramatic improvements in IT efficiency and provides for rapid deployment of new IT services to support future business growth. IBM is helping clients move to new enterprise data centers by focusing on best practices around virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.  

New Generation of Power Systems

The two new computers are part of a comprehensive launch of a new generation of IBM Power Systems that began last week. The launch also includes new milestones, an update to an aggressive UNIX migration program, a Power 570 refresh and Power Systems software updates including:

• A milestone of successfully migrating more than 1,000 clients from competitive platforms to IBM Power Systems - resulting in nearly $1 billion in revenues.

• A new aggressive IBM Power Rewards migration program allowing customers to earn rewards points by trading in selected HP or Sun UNIX systems. Customers trading in a PA-RISC based HP Superdome system, for example, can earn as much as $512,000 in migration services at no additional charge.

• PowerCare – a new services option included with every Power 595 that allows customers to more easily get no-charge, quick-start help from IBM when exploiting differentiating features of Power Systems, such as advanced virtualization, energy efficiency, increased security, or high availability.

• A new IBM Power 570, a popular midrange system, which is a unified version of the already in-market POWER6 processor-based System p 570 and the System i 570. Existing customers can update to the new system at no-charge.

• More Power Systems Software alignment across UNIX, IBM i, and Linux® operating environments, including the new PowerHA™ family for high availability products.

Companies around the world have saved money by migrating from competitive UNIX servers and consolidating on IBM Power Systems. For instance, Energen, one of the top 20 independent oil and gas exploration and production companies in the United States, was able to save more than $500,000 annually by consolidating 20 Sun servers onto two System p 570 servers. The project accelerated new server deployment from one month to two days.

"The server consolidation project was hugely successful," said Brunson White, vice president and CIO of Energen. "We have never completed a project that has so quickly generated as much return on investment as this one. And we achieved increased system performance as well."

"Today's announcement of incredibly high-value UNIX and supercomputer solutions, coupled with last week's announcement of the first of a new generation of servers that takes our System i clients forward on a mainstream platform, opens up a whole new world of possibilities for our Power Systems clients," said Ross Mauri, general manager, IBM Power Systems. "The world's most powerful enterprise UNIX server with superior virtualization for workload balancing across UNIX, Linux and i applications and the water-cooled supercomputer represent major breakthroughs in innovation and energy efficiency for IBM clients and make the new enterprise data center a reality. Sun and HP UNIX customers just might discover the new Power Rewards program is the impetus to make the switch to the Power roadmap."

Leading UNIX Provider

According to IDC, IBM today ranks as the world's leading provider of UNIX solutions and has led for the last 10 quarters on a rolling four-quarter average of revenue. Last year, IBM gained revenue share again and maintained UNIX leadership with a 33.8 percent share and finished 3.1 points ahead of number 2 Sun and 7.7 points ahead of number 3 HP. In fact, IBM is the only major UNIX vendor to gain cumulative revenue share in the past five years (+11.3 points) while both Sun (-1.7 points) and HP (-4 points) lost share between 2003 and 2007.

IDC forecasts this market will continue to grow, with combined UNIX and Linux server spending to increase $1.2 billion between 2007 and 2011, to a total opportunity of $27.4 billion in 2011, 45 percent of all projected customer spend.

New Enterprise UNIX Server

The new 64-core, 128-thread Power 595 now ranks as the world's fastest UNIX system. Using the latest 5.0 GHz POWER6 processor chips with dual memory controllers, and leveraging a new, sophisticated symmetric multi-processor (SMP) point-to-point interconnect to communicate between its cores, the Power 595 bested the results of all competitors for running large two-tier environments running the SAP® ERP application. In fact, two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark results showed a 32 processor/64-core/128 thread Power 595 can handle more than twice the number of users per core of a 64 processor/128-core/256 thread Itanium-based HP Superdome system.

The Power 595 SMP point-to-point interconnect starts with 8-core nodes that are built from four dual-core POWER6 chips tightly integrated into one module with direct interconnects between all four chips in the node. Then these 8-core nodes are connected into a superlinear-scaling fashion meaning each time a node is added it is connected point-to-point to all previous nodes, so that together there are actually 28 interconnects between those eight nodes. This provides massive amounts of bandwidth to gain the maximum exploitation of the total system processor, memory and cache capability.

The Power 595 supports up to 4 TB of memory per server, twice as much as the HP Superdome and Sun SPARC. Continuing the IBM tradition of innovation with the Power Architecture® systems design, the Power 595 also supports four memory operations per cycle and an aggregate memory bandwidth of more than 1.3 TB/sec (terabytes per second), which is enough to transfer in each second the amount of information printed on the paper made from 50,000 trees. (7)

With clients purchasing more and more servers, the advanced capabilities of the Power 595 are designed to help simplify the infrastructure and save enterprise data center costs through server consolidation, easier systems management and energy savings. For example, POWER6 EnergyScale™ technology, working in concert with IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager™, supports all Power Systems servers. It provides the capabilities for better facility planning, energy and cost savings, and peak energy usage control, and can increase energy efficiency for Power Systems users byup to 25 percent.

Unparalleled Virtualization for New Enterprise Data Center

Featuring up to 254 virtualized partitions, the Power 595 offers leadership virtualization technology for large-scale consolidation with optional PowerVM™ technology. IBM estimates more than 90 percent of Power Systems enterprise servers currently use PowerVM technology to more effectively manage their IT costs.

PowerVM Enterprise Edition offers Live Partition Mobility on the Power 595, allowing an entire AIX or Linux partition to be moved, while running, to another POWER6 processor-based system, allowing the reduction or elimination of planned downtime and increasing application availability. Live Partition Mobility is an exclusive of IBM POWER6 UNIX and Linux. HP and Sun do not have the same feature for their SPARC or Itanium technology-based systems.

Filling out the Power Systems lineup, IBM recently introduced the Power 520 Express and Power 550 Express – i Editions for the SMB market. The new Power 570 is a unified version – with common firmware, pricing, and a single set of feature codes - combining the already in-market POWER6-based System p 570 and the System i 570.

The new Power 570 runs any permutation and combination of i, AIX or Linux partitions offering the ultimate in flexibility and increased asset utilization and reuse. And with PowerVM, Power servers also run many Linux x86 applications.

Power Rewards Program

Similar to a frequent flyer incentive, this new program offers reward points to competitively installed customers based on the number of HP or Sun cores retired or traded-in when migrating to IBM Power Systems. Customers can redeem points toward no-charge migration services to move from HP-UX or Sun Solaris to AIX or Linux operating environments. IBM is offering a very aggressive 1,000 points per core for Sun UltraSPARC and SPARC-based systems, HP Alpha and Itanium technology-based systems, and SGI MIPS trade ins.

Since HP will no longer guarantee they will sell PA-RISC-based HP Superdome systems after the end of the year, IBM is giving those customers a highly attractive alternative to HP’s multi-year plea to migrate to Itanium technology-based HP Superdome. IBM is offering quadruple the Power Rewards points for PA-RISC-based system trade-ins -- or 4,000 per core, redeemable for up to $4,000 worth of no-charge IBM migration services --- to help those customers easily justify the migration to IBM.

A wide range of additional discounts on hardware, software or services are available and a reward points table is published for accumulating and redeeming Power Rewards. IBM will also re-use or recycle competitive HP or Sun servers in an eco-responsible manner.

IBM Global Technology Services offers a full complement of asset-based, standardized services for Power Systems, ranging from implementation to availability, virtualization and support, along with energy efficiency and security assessments, which allow clients to maximize their investment in IBM Power servers and software. Clients can also take advantage of PowerCare Services -- with the purchase of a Power 595 server, clients are eligible to select one of five PowerCare services options, free of charge.

Power™ Systems Software

IBM also introduced a new family of high availability solutions, called PowerHA, designed to help customers maximize system availability and performance for AIX, i and Linux operating systems through disk clustering, logical replication and other capabilities. For better alignment within the Power Systems Software portfolio, IBM High Availability Cluster Management Program for AIX and Linux will become PowerHA for AIX and PowerHA for Linux and the IBM High Availability Solutions Manager for i5/OS will become Power HAfor i.

As announced last week at the COMMON User Group Conference, the new Power Systems platform continues the decades long value of application compatibility for System i clients. Now, i clients can run their traditional applications unchanged alongside their new Web-based applications, on everything from blades to scalable servers based on the industry's fastest POWER6 processors.

Availability

The Power 595 supports AIX, the IBM UNIX operating system. Support for both IBM i and Linux is planned for the second half of 2008. IBM is offering attractively-priced upgrade options to allow clients to leverage their current investments in POWER5 processor-based 590 and 595 systems.

The Power 595 will be generally available on May 6.

Click here for complete announcement.

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IBM Acquires Encentuate

IBM today announced it has acquired Encentuate, Inc., a privately held company based in Redwood City, California, and a leading provider of identity and access management software focused on enterprise single sign-on and integration of strong authentication technology. IBM will integrate Encentuate into IBM Software Group’s Tivoli division. Financial terms were not disclosed.

IBM also today announced the forming of the IBM Security Software Laboratory in Singapore. Consistent with the company’s globally integrated enterprise strategy that draws on local, highly-skilled specialists to service all clients, the new lab will utilize the expertise of Encentuate’s Singapore development team to better serve IBM clients in Asia and around the world.

Identity and access management have emerged as a critical issue for businesses, driven in large part by businesses’ efforts to comply with the growing number of worldwide regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Basel II, Japan's Financial Instruments and Exchange Law and the Payment Card Industry’s customer identity protection requirements. According to a February 2008 Forrester research report, the identity and access management opportunity will grow from $2.6 billion in 2006 to more than $12.3 billion in 2014 (1). In this area, enterprise single sign-on software is a business productivity tool that allows users to simplify secure sign-on to a corporate network once and automatically handles subsequent access to various desktop, e-mail, legacy and hosted applications.

Encentuate’s strength lies within its industry-leading ability to track and facilitate identity usage while helping to increase user productivity. It can reduce the burden of remembering different passwords, rules and user IDs while helping to improve security by automatically managing user passwords, sign-ons, sign-offs and enforcing security policies. It allows IT administrators to quickly integrate legacy and new applications to leverage the Encentuate single sign-on technology.

Additionally, by centrally tracking and collating log-in attempts, Encentuate provides companies with audit and reporting capabilities that help them document and report on their efforts to meet governance and compliance requirements. Encentuate provides extensive application and shared workstation support for a range of legacy, Web-based and service oriented architecture applications across industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, finance and government.

According to analyst firm IDC, IBM is the leading provider of identity and access management security software based on worldwide revenue (2), and Encentuate is a key addition to the company’s portfolio. Encentuate technology will be offered as part of the IBM Tivoli Access Manager suite and IBM expects to integrate Encentuate with its broad set of security management offerings such as IBM Tivoli Identity Manager, IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, IBM Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager and IBM Tivoli Security Operations Manager.

“IBM has made a strategic decision to acquire Encentuate because customers are increasingly seeking a complete identity and access management solution with IBM quality and support,” said Al Zollar, general manager, IBM Tivoli software. “Encentuate technology advances our capabilities in enterprise single sign-on by offering customers an easy to use solution, more flexible integration with strong authentication form factors, dynamic session management and compliance-focused auditing and reporting capabilities.”

“We are pleased to join IBM and we believe that this acquisition validates the value that our single sign-on solutions bring to the market as the need for secure identity and access management continues to grow,” said Zorawar Biri Singh, President and CEO at Encentuate. “Our customers will significantly benefit from IBM’s worldwide customer support and continued investment in integrated security software that leverages our technology.”

“With this acquisition and the formation of the IBM Security Software Laboratory in Singapore, we will be able to continue to develop our vision and make an even greater contribution to the industry,” added Peng T. Ong, Founder and Chairman of Encentuate. “At the same time, Encentuate will help bolster IBM’s ability to provide the industry’s broadest security and risk management portfolio.”

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Share Huge Files in Seconds with Green Optical Network Technology

IBM Researchers today unveiled a prototype technology that could bring massive amounts of bandwidth in an energy efficient way to all kinds of machines -- from supercomputers to cell phones -- that could revolutionize the way people access, use and share information across many different applications.

The new technology uses light instead of wires to send information and could allow, for example, the transmission of 8 trillion bits (terabits) per second of information -- equivalent to about 5,000 high-definition video streams -- using the power of a single 100-watt lightbulb.

This kind of bandwidth can drive energy efficiencies inside of datacenters and speed the sharing of large datasets, whether it's scientists crunching data to discover new drugs and forecast the weather, people sharing high-definition movies between devices and friends, doctors sending high-definition medical images to a specialist in seconds for diagnoses while patient is in office, or bringing the power of high-definition to mobile phones.

Consistent with green computing initiatives, the new optical technology could save massive amounts of power in supercomputers. For a typical 100 meter long link, the power consumed by the optical technology is 100 times less than today's electrical interconnects, and offers a power savings of 10 times over current commercial optical modules.

This prototype "green optical link" is designed to meet the bandwidth requirements for peta- and exa-flop supercomputing, marking a significant leap from related work unveiled by the same research team a year ago. The new technology puts optical chips and optical data buses in a single package with standard components.

"Last year we unveiled an optical transceiver chip-set that could transmit a high-definition movie in under a second using highly customized optical components and processes," said IBM Researcher Clint Schow, part of the team that built the prototype. "Just a year later, we've now connected those high speed chips through printed circuit boards with dense integrated optical 'wiring.' Now we have built an even faster transceiver and have moved the optical components away from custom devices to more standard parts procured from a volume manufacturer, taking an important step toward commercializing the technology."

The applications for this technology range from cell phones to supercomputers and span industries from consumer electronics to healthcare, including:

• High-definition content everywhere: As high-definition video becomes more widespread, this technology will enable widespread HD video sharing and video on-demand by dramatically increasing the bandwidth of video servers. Web-serving sites that host videos could use the technology to access libraries with millions of high-definition movies and video clips in seconds, speeding up access for users. By incorporating an optical data port in laptops, HD video recorders, personal mp3 and video players, cell phones, or PDAs, HD video content could be stored and displayed on high- resolution external screens.
• Patient Care: Physicians and researchers could send high-definition images such as MRIs, heart scans which are huge files, for real-time analysis and 3-D visualization.
• Consumer electronics: "Scaled-down" versions of the optical interconnect technology may find applications in a range of consumer products. For example, in cell phones, one chip could sit in the base of the phone and the other could sit in the display, allowing for very large files, even high-definition content move from one to the other. The advantage is that by using optics instead of wires, the display can be flipped up and down or moved from side-to-side without being impeded by electrical wires.
• Massive Bandwidth for Supercomputing: The improved bandwidth of data interconnects will enable massively parallel supercomputers to have a profound impact in many fields: offering improved molecular dynamics calculations, accelerating drug discoveries, providing accurate weather/climate modeling, as well advancing our understanding of sub- nuclear physics such as quantum chromodynamics.

The prototype that the IBM scientists revealed today is the world's fastest and most integrated optical data bus that could lead to connecting an unprecedented number of high-performance computers to work as a single system.

Tech Specs Behind IBM's Green Optical Network Technology
The optically-enabled circuit boards, or "Optocards," employ an array of low-loss polymer optical waveguides to conduct light between transmitters and receivers. The complete databus constructed with these Optocards not only incorporates a large number of high-speed channels, but also closely packs them to achieve unprecedented density: each waveguide channel is smaller in size than a human hair. The packaging approach for the complete system is unique in that it utilizes hybrid chip integration to produce a highly integrated optical module, or "Optochip."

The Optochip is a multi-component 3-D assembly, that is constructed with conventional surface mount solder processes similar to those currently used in the mass-production of electrical chips. The 10 Gb/channel databus is the first ever demonstration of an integrated module-to-module, 32-channel optical datalink on a printed circuit board. The need for high-bandwidth photonic communications between chips or modules has been discussed in technical literature for more than a decade, and various small pieces of the technology have been shown. IBM has assembled a fully functional and integrated solution, significantly advancing the field of chip-level optical interconnects. By proving the viability of high-density parallel optics, IBM has accelerated the prospect of real-world deployment of practical, high-capacity interconnects between chips.

In addition to the optical data bus, IBM also has developed a parallel optical transceiver module with a higher number of channels and an increased speed of operation: 24 transmitters and 24 receivers that each operate at 12.5 Gb/s. The resulting total bi-directional data transfer rate is an unprecedented 300 Gb/s, nearly doubling the performance of the earlier generation. Compared to current commercial optical modules the transceiver provides 10x greater bandwidth in 1/10 the volume while consuming comparable power. To enable low-cost volume production, the new transceiver uses standard 850-nm vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), high-speed versions of the inexpensive devices found in many computer mice. By focusing on innovative packaging of low-cost and low-power technologies such as VCSELs and CMOS chips, IBM Research is paving the way to the widespread adoption of optical communications.

IBM has a long history of research into high-bandwidth parallel optics, and the current breakthroughs were achieved as part of a DARPA-funded program, launched in 2003, to demonstrate high-bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnects through polymer waveguides integrated on a printed circuit board. Further details of this work will be provided through two presentations at the 2008 Optical Fiber Communications Conference in San Diego, CA. Clint Schow will present "300-Gb/s, 24-Channel Full-Duplex, 850-nm, CMOS-Based Optical Transceivers," on Feb 25th and Fuad Doany will present "Chip-to-Chip Board-Level Optical Data Buses," on Feb. 28th.

Source

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IBM Advances Web 2.0 Platform for Business

Today at Lotusphere, IBM unveiled a range of Web 2.0 and collaboration tools to enable enterprise mashups and social software, and help clients improve agility and speed decision-making for an increasingly virtual, global workforce.

"Web 2.0 for business is about empowering users with the content, social connections and mashup tools to solve business problems," said Michael Rhodin, general manager, IBM Lotus Software. "Today's announcement illustrates the ongoing commitment of IBM to deliver innovation to our customers."

Lotusphere attendees received an early look at IBM's commercial mashup maker, IBM Lotus Mashups. Building on its leadership in the mashup space for more than two years, IBM Lotus Mashups allows non-technical users to easily create enterprise mashups. To solve real business problems with mashups, users can create ad hoc visualizations by blending enterprise and Web-based data. IBM Lotus Mashups includes:

• A browser-based tool that provides easy assembly of new mashups
• A rich set of out-of-the-box, business-ready widgets
• A catalog for finding and sharing widgets and mashups
• A builder for the creation of widgets that access enterprise systems
  

In addition, IBM introduced the next release of its popular social software for business, IBM Lotus Connections. Since the announcement of Lotus Connections at Lotusphere 2007, it has been deployed by hundreds of organizations around the world. Expecting to be released in the first half of 2008, plans for Lotus Connections 2.0 include several new features such as a new homepage.

The new homepage -- based on Lotus mashup technology -- aggregates and filters social data from all five services of Lotus Connections into a customizable view. Using the widget-based homepage, users can quickly see what has changed across their professional network and easily search for the information they need to get things done. Customers or IBM Business Partners could also create widgets that link information to other social networks such as Yahoo or LinkedIn.

The community component of Lotus Connections is planned be enhanced with discussion forums and the ability to link leading wiki services from IBM Lotus Quickr, SocialText and Atlassian. Lotus Sametime can directly use Lotus Connections community membership lists to integrate unified communications with social networking.

IBM also demonstrated the new IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1, a rich collaboration environment available through the Web and desktop plug-ins, which allows teams to more effectively work together. Plans for Lotus Quickr 8.1 include content libraries, team discussion forums, blogs, wikis and other connectors that make sharing information easier. Lotus Quickr Entry is planned to be added to the Quickr family and will enable personal file sharing through a subset of traditional Lotus Quickr capabilities such as connectors.

IBM also previewed the planned capability to integrate Lotus Quickr with Enterprise Content Management Systems, such as IBM FileNet P8 and IBM Content Manager, providing the industry's most complete end-to-end content and collaboration solution from a single vendor.

IBM social software and leadership in Web 2.0 technology and governance models is helping companies unlock the knowledge within its employee base, making it faster and easier to find topic experts and bring together diverse teams around a common point of interest. In addition, IBM Global Services recently launched a new consulting offering to help clients understand how emerging technologies, such as Web 2.0, social computing, SOA, 3D internet and virtual worlds, can be used to help improve business performance and deliver tangible business value today.

For more information on IBM's Web 2.0 and Lotus Software efforts please visit:
www.ibm.com/software/info/web20 or www.ibm.com/press/Lotusphere

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IBM Acquires AptSoft

IBM today announced it is expanding its business event processing software portfolio by acquiring AptSoft Corporation, a privately-held software company based in Burlington, Massachusetts. Financial details were not disclosed.

AptSoft technology helps businesses uncover the cause-and-effect relationships among seemingly disparate business events that occur in milliseconds or throughout defined periods of time. AptSoft's business event processing software further illustrates IBM's commitment to pursuing the service oriented architecture (SOA) market opportunity and will complement IBM's existing SOA software and related services offerings that span the WebSphere, Information Management and Tivoli brands as well as RFID and Web 2.0 capabilities and industry-specific solutions.

Business event processing software helps customers identify patterns and establish connections between events and then initiates a trigger when a trend emerges. The role of event processing is becoming increasingly important because it enables companies of all sizes and industries to proactively analyze and respond to minute market changes that can have significant business impact. This allows companies to seize critical business opportunities or mitigate risks before they negatively affect their ability to compete.

"We welcome AptSoft into the IBM SOA portfolio and look forward to further extending our leadership position in the business events market. AptSoft enables customers to capture events as they happen with an intuitive user interface designed for business analysts," said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM WebSphere software. "AptSoft complements IBM's SOA strategy and augments our business events capabilities to help our customers maximize their existing investments in SOA."

AptSoft technology will strengthen IBM's SOA and business process management (BPM) offerings through its simple, intuitive interface and correlation capabilities, which are designed to be easily used by business analysts and information technology (IT) professionals.

Business event processing can also be used in a variety of ways: in the massive multi-player online game industry for uncovering potentially unscrupulous activities among the tens of thousands of movements per second; by e-commerce vendors to help identify fraud and reduce abandoned shopping carts; by healthcare providers to inspire patients to make healthier lifestyle choices based on information pooled from various medical software applications; and by trading markets to uncover and compare minute changes throughout global markets to support buy/sell decisions as well as ensure the timely execution of bids. In addition, it can be used by retailers to proactively alert them about the success or failure of a product as goods move off the shelf, allowing them to make changes to pricing, inventory and marketing campaigns in real time; and by fleet management companies, to help them make instantaneous decisions on how to deal with products that are lost in transit or delayed due to unforeseen circumstances.

"As SOA continues to evolve, companies are linking event processing and BPM to gain deeper insight into the transactions and events that shape their business and industries as a whole," said Frank Chisholm, former CEO and founder of AptSoft. "On behalf of the AptSoft team, we look forward to integrating AptSoft products with IBM's offerings to help ensure the alignment of business and IT which will lead to greater customer success."

AptSoft technology further extends investments IBM is making in business event processing and business process management, which include WebSphere Event Broker, WebSphere Business Monitor, WebSphere Application Server, DB2 Real-Time Insight and Tivoli NetCool products.

AptSoft products will become part of the IBM Software Group WebSphere software brand.

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IBM, Intel and Cisco Open High-Performance Computing Center

IBM, Intel and Cisco announced that they have opened a High-Performance Computing (HPC) Center, expanding IBM’s existing HPC facility here. The expanded state-of-the-art HPC center will offer customers, business partners and independent software vendors the ability to test and benchmark analytic software, engineering, aerospace design and other high-performance applications.

The opening of this center combines the world’s fastest cluster computers from IBM with the high-performance InfiniBand and Ethernet networking technology from Cisco and Intel’s most advanced multi-core processors. Together these technologies provide customers a comprehensive test-bed to simplify the set-up and operation of their high performance infrastructure.

“We’re pleased to expand our Montpellier Center with new HPC technologies from Intel and Cisco,” said Dave Jursik, VP of sales for IBM Deep Computing. “This new capability will leverage the HPC resources and expertise in Montpellier and help IBM bring the benefits of high-performance computing to departmental and mid-scale users. Customers and partners, for example, will be able to size, test and benchmark critical applications such as Fluent.”

IBM leads the industry with 186 clusters on the November, 2007 TOP500 Supercomputer Sites List. IBM offers a range of Intel-based cluster solutions including the System Cluster 1350 – an integrated HPC cluster solution that blends System x and BladeCenter servers with key systems management and applications software.

“As the need for high-performance computing applications continues to grow, customers need to test drive these applications on a real-world IT infrastructure that uses the market leading HPC technologies,” added Phil Andrews, director of DataCentre Technologies for Cisco Europe. “Together with IBM and Intel, we are providing a center where our customers can come and experience their applications at the speed of high performance computing and determine the technologies they need create the same experience in their own environment.”

Cisco Infiniband Technology is the leading networking solution for High-Performance Computing from Cisco. The Cisco SFS7000 and SFS3000 Infiniband technology products support the needs of applications that need to be deployed on HPC clusters with the highest possible performance. The products are also extensively used in low latency networks for financial trading systems. Deployed in some of the largest HPC clusters in the world and at some of the largest financial institutions, Cisco is a leader in Infiniband technology.

“Intel is proud to be a part of this project.” said Christian Morales, Vice President and General Manager, Intel EMEA. “A growing number of companies are seeking to increase their competitiveness and operational efficiency by taking advantage of the benefits that high performance compute clusters bring. Customers and integrators of midsized and smaller cluster solutions can use the Montpellier center to develop, tune and fully test their solutions on servers based on Intel’s latest 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon microprocessors. Intel brings HPC application expertise, ground breaking processing capacity and energy-efficient performance to this collaboration”

The center will be equipped with a mix of 45nm and 65nm based Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® microprocessors on 32 IBM BladeCenter servers, interconnected by Cisco Infiniband and Ethernet switches. The companies plan to expand the facility as new technology becomes available to keep customers on the leading edge of cluster computing.

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IBM to Acquire Net Integration Technologies Inc.

IBM today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Net Integration Technologies Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based, privately held company that offers a complete business server software solution for small businesses. Financial details were not disclosed.

Net Integration Technologies provides server software for small to medium businesses that is simple and easy to maintain. The Net Integration server software solution includes email, file management, directory services, back-up and recovery, office productivity tools and other business software. The server software is designed for businesses with limited or no in-house technical resources.

"Small businesses need superior collaboration technology as much as large companies do," said Michael D. Rhodin, general manager, IBM Lotus Software. "The difference is that it must be an affordable turnkey package that doesn't require a large investment in on-site IT expertise and resources. Net Integration Technologies meets that need for our SMB customers and represents a terrific business opportunity for IBM's business partners."

Net Integration's business software helps small companies get up and running quickly -- often with their first business server -- enabling owners to focus on growing their businesses rather than wasting time and money trying to run their office systems.

"Net Integration has proven that it takes a unique approach to meet the specialized IT needs of small, medium and remote offices," said Ozzy Papic, president and CEO of Net Integration. "We have delivered award-winning solutions for small-business budgets, making information technology simple and reliable for SMBs. Now we look forward to working within IBM to utilize this technology in exciting new ways."

Industry observers have favorably rated Net Integration's small-business server software solution against other, higher-priced offerings. Net Integration has received high marks for its ease-of-use, installation and disaster recovery features.

The transaction is subject to customary approvals and closing conditions, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008.

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IBM Acquires XIV

IBM  today announced it has acquired XIV, a privately held storage technology company based in Tel Aviv, Israel. XIV, its technologies and employees, will become part of the IBM System Storage business unit of the IBM Systems and Technology Group. Financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.

"The acquisition of XIV will further strengthen the IBM infrastructure portfolio long term and put IBM in the best position to address emerging storage opportunities like Web 2.0 applications, digital archives and digital media," said Andy Monshaw, general manager, IBM System Storage. "The ability for almost anyone to create digital content at any time has accelerated the need for a whole new way of applying infrastructure solutions to the new world of digital information. IBM's goal is to provide the leading technologies and solutions at every layer of the data center -- storage, servers, software and services -- to address these new realities IT customers face."

To address the new requirements associated with next generation digital content, IBM chose XIV and its NEXTRA™ architecture for its ability to scale dynamically, heal itself in the event of failure, and self-tune for optimum performance, all while eliminating the significant management burden typically associated with rapid growth environments. The architecture also is designed to automatically optimize resource utilization of all the components within the system, which can allow for easier management and configuration and improved performance and data availability.

"We are pleased to become a significant part of the IBM family, allowing for our unique storage architecture, our engineers and our storage industry experience to be part of IBM's overall storage business," said Moshe Yanai, chairman, XIV. "We believe the level of technological innovation achieved by our development team is