IBM Makes Strides to Simplify IT Infrastructure

At face value, a mainframe and a server blade don’t appear to be anything other than polar opposites. To IBM, however, the two share a common capability that binds. Together, they can help simplify the data center, enabling it to more easily scale up and scale out to accommodate the stress and strain of on-demand computing.

Mainframe + Blades + Grid = New Flexibility was the equation for a simplified data center presented at a day-long IBM Systems Group press briefing.

Mainframe + blades + grid = new flexibility was the much-discussed prototype of infrastructure simplification at a recent day-long
IBM Systems Group press briefing in Somers, New York, which the ServerWatch team attended.

The current state of many IT infrastructures is a sprawling, distributed, “hodgepodge of everything,” said Clay Ryder, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Sageza Group. The booming economy and potential Y2K fear of the late-1990s lead to “a bevy of IT investment,” Ryder said. Few of the purchases made in these heady times were strategic, leaving enterprises with “computing fiefdoms with minimal corporate leverage and return on investment. When all was said and done, companies had no idea what they had.” In the aftermath, they were left with excessive overhead and underutilization of resources, Ryder said.

The recent movement toward distributed computing, which enables organizations to easily reuse data in ways other than how it was intended to be used and that were formerly not possible, has added to the confusion.