Surf's Up! Wave 2 of IBM's Information Infrastructure Has Arrived

11:30 AM -- IBM's vision of a Dynamic Infrastructure revolves around the theme of "a smarter planet needs a smarter infrastructure." Achieving a dynamic infrastructure requires an integrated approach leveraging many IT capabilities, including service management, virtualization and consolidation, and security. The company believes enabling the convergence of business and IT infrastructures into one dynamic infrastructure will provide a stimulus for societal and business transformation, and will allow IBM to take a leadership role in helping its clients harness emerging IT capabilities.

Overarching strategic visions such as that of IBM serve two very useful purposes: 1) They let customers understand that IBM knows where it plans to go, and that will benefit them in the long run even though the specifics will have to be filled in over time; and 2) The vision helps build alignment internally for employee buy-in and resource allocation. However, IBM also needed to connect the broader long-term vision with a pragmatic strategy that deals with the here and now -- a world where customers are trying to deal with a challenging economic environment while remaining highly competitive. And IBM does that through its information infrastructure strategy.

IBM believes that its information infrastructure is essential to "manage information more effectively and to mitigate information risks with a dynamic infrastructure." The information infrastructure model follows IBM's CARS (Information Compliance, Information Availability, Information Retention, and Information Security) methodology. According to the company, information compliance mitigates information risks, information availability delivers continuous access to information, information retention supports information retention policies, and information security enables the secure sharing of information.

Trying to pry dollars out of pinched budgets is a challenge for all businesses, since economic conditions are focusing customers on the dollars-and-cents benefits of the solutions and services they buy. IBM sees client requirements for the value of information infrastructure as: consolidation, value, quantified short-term ROI (like, within a year!), and efficiency (which translates into lower asset costs, lower energy costs, and optimized use of existing assets).

Rolling up its sleeves, IBM has announced Wave 2 of its information infrastructure initiative with a number of products, including:

IBM has thrown down the gauntlet to competitors with all its claims. Apart from the individual product claims, they fall into three categories:

IBM also announced some new data protection capabilities including a cloud-based service for continuous data protection. The company also plans to offer Tivoli Storage Manager as a service for cloud-based backup and restore.IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure sets a visionary framework within which its information infrastructure sits, but the company also realizes that product and service sales are driven by what it can do for customers today. And that shorter-term market reality is motivated more and more by helping customers deal with the economic challenges they face. IBM has issued a fusillade of new and enhanced information infrastructure products and services that are aimed at ensuring that customers meet those immediate, inescapable challenges.

That fusillade ranges through its established products, such as enterprise-class DS8000 disk storage systems, its SAN Volume Controller, and Tivoli Storage Manager, to products garnered from acquisitions, such as ProtecTIER and XIV, to newer ventures, such as cloud computing. While pursuing a Dynamic Infrastructure over the long term is a great and valuable exercise, using practical information infrastructure solutions to help customers survive common battles and hand-to-hand combat is what will drive IBMs business day to day.

– David Hill is principal of Mesabi Group LLC, which focuses on helping organizations make their complex storage, storage management, and interrelated IT infrastructure decisions easier by making the choices simpler and clearer to understand.