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Smarter By Design

‘That’s the way to build capacity and hold costs flat,’ says IBM VP Doug Brown

The demand for smart, interconnected and portable data is fundamentally reshaping computing and, at its heart, the data center. Working with clients across the globe, IBM had a vision to better leverage knowledge across connections—for example, to connect patients with specialists in other countries or farmers with global markets. But this Smarter Planet* initiative can’t happen within traditional approaches to IT that add sprawl while limiting integration and responsiveness to customer needs.

“With IT budgets being essentially flat, there’s no way to keep up with this increasing demand for data unless we can dramatically change the way IT is designed, built and managed,” says Doug Brown, vice president of Power* and System z* global marketing, IBM. Enter smarter computing. “What smarter computing does is provide the IT infrastructure that enables a smarter planet.”

Smarter computing plays to the strengths of IBM’s Power, System z and System x* technologies to handle more data, optimize workloads and run secure, stable virtual environments in which to expand capabilities on the fly. Reconfiguring the data center and leveraging optimized systems are hallmarks of smarter computing, helping IBM clients increase IT capacity and deliver actionable insights from data while holding costs flat.

Reconfiguring the Data Center

IBM is reimagining data centers to make them smarter. Consolidating workloads, redeploying them and deploying new workloads are three ways to leverage optimized systems for smarter computing.

Consolidating Workloads

The first step toward smarter computing for many organizations is through consolidation, to reduce total cost of ownership and better manage data-center complexity. “It’s the best way to start getting the economic benefit from smarter computing,” Brown explains. Distributed environments can be underutilized by as much as 85 percent. Power Systems and System z environments increase utilization to 70 percent and 90 percent, respectively, for workloads running on IBM x86 and UNIX* systems. Having a variety of scale-up servers like Power and System z machines, combined with scale-out servers like IBM BladeCenter* and System x technologies, is an important component of smarter computing.

The results can be dramatic. By consolidating workloads, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) not only avoided building a new $80 million data center, but also transitioned existing data-center space to more hospital rooms.

The Bank of Russia—which serves the state, the Russian people and private businesses—needed to simplify and consolidate a variety of local payment-processing systems running on more than 200 distributed servers in 74 data centers across 11 time zones. Working with IBM and EC-Leasing, the bank consolidated its entire infrastructure to just four IBM System z9* Enterprise Class mainframes in two data centers. IBM Global Mirror and Metro Mirror enable mutual failover between the data centers, which are separated by 1,000 kilometers for disaster-protection and business resilience.

The move reduced payment-processing costs by 95 percent, saving $400 million annually, and decreased workload for technical staff by 85 percent and labor costs by up to 70 percent. Server and data-center consolidation created further savings on hardware and software licensing and maintenance and electricity, as well as increasing security.

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