3 Steps To Transforming The Economics Of Data

Data is growing at an explosive rate - over 667 exabytes of data will flow through the Internet alone in 2014. What is exabyte - that's 667 quintillion bytes ... 667 with 18 zeros after!! 

This tremendous growth places intense demands on storage systems, especially flash arrays and storage virtualization.  How can clients transform the economics of data? 

 Watch this video: This clear and simple white-boarding video below explains the details. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kik3I7krTMQ

New Challenges From Big Data

Companies are facing challenges from data:

1. Growing Data – not just the traditional structured data from traditional, but also the unstructured data from social media

2. Storage inefficiency – companies are buying 24 percent more storage but less than half is used.

3. Storage complexity – More data is generated across departments which is not linked across the organization

Making Sense of Data

How can we make sense of the data and enable the infrastructure to support it?

1. Optimize the storage with real time compression technology – store 5x more data and reduce cost by 60%

2. Maximize performance with flash – business applications can run 3.5x faster

3. Enable new workload with software defined storage – simply storage management and access to get data when needed, easy to deploy cloud, social and mobile platforms.

Data Helps To Stay Ahead Of Competition

With the right infrastructure and technology, business can stay ahead of competition. Each division can access data and use it for competitive advantage:

1. Sales gets insights and are able to run analytics needed to make more profitable business

2. Marketing can run highly effective marketing campaigns with better customer insights

3. Finance can keep cost under lock with more efficient technology

Request for a 1-on-1 Demo

Register for Storage Solution Demo:

https://www.ibm.com/services/forms/signup.do?source=stg-transforming_the_economic

For more specific demo related to Cloud & Big Data Analytics:

• IBM Elastic Storage for Big Data

IBM Software Defined Storage transforms data economics for traditional and new era workloads with new data flexibility, agility, and responsiveness – all delivered through software.  And at the same time, maintaining the required security and reliability that are critical for your data systems. IBM Elastic Storage provides high performance for petabytes of data and billions of file using a mixture of disk and LTO tape under a single global namespace and reduce TCO up to 15x and energy consumption up to 230x. This demo shows automatic data placement policy and movement across disk and tape tiers and still retains data availability for your applications at all times.

• IBM Storage on Cloud

Enables enterprises to implement a private cloud storage service where users, with a few clicks, can request & receive storage capacity, share files with other users, and administrators can easily monitor & report usage. Simplify work for your storage admin, and reduce SAN & NAS storage provisioning time from days and weeks to minutes!

IBM Races Ahead With Infiniti Red Bull Racing

IBM Asean GM Kellar Neville urges all to race forward, just like how Infiniti RedBull Racing partners with IBM STG platform computing as Innovation Partner to win in Formula One races!

Check out my blog on Infiniti Red Bull: http://annephey.blogspot.sg/2014/10/technology-secret-to-winning-f1.html

Check out slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/annephey/blog-2014-1016-infiniti-red-bulls-secrets-to-winning-f1-races

Check out the video from IBM XCITE Business Leaders Day below

#smartercomputing #redbullracing #infrastructurematters #technology #storage #bigdata #analytics

Al Peasland of Infiniti Red Bull Racing on Innovation Partnership with IBM Platform Computing

Al Peasland (Head of Technical Partnership) from Infiniti Red Bull Racing talks about the continued Innovation Partnership with IBM STG's Platform Computing (Symphony, Elastic Storage & Software Defined Storage).

Check out my blog on the details: http://annephey.blogspot.sg/2014/10/technology-secret-to-winning-f1.html

Check out slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/annephey/blog-2014-1016-infiniti-red-bulls-secrets-to-winning-f1-races

#smartercomputing #redbullracing #infrastructurematters #technology #storage #bigdata #analytics

Symantec Splits Up. Perhaps 2 Is Better Than 1.

Symantec Splits Up In A Series Of Silicon Valley Heart Breaks.

First,  EBay Inc (EBAY) decided on 30^th September to spin off its PayPal payments unit from its market place business. Then Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) announced their split on 6^th October into two companies by end of fiscal year 2015.  Barely a week away, Symantec (SYMC) announced its plans on 10^th October to separate the company into two with an even more aggressive deadline of end December 2014.

Symantec’s split essentially reverses its $13.5 billion acquisition of storage company VERITAS Software in 2005, and follows the trend of splitting up to focus on faster growing business.

1. WHY SPLIT

The reason given was that the security and storage industries are changing at a fast pace. Both businesses need different strategies, investments and go to market. Symantec said the split will allow each company to:

• Focus on growth opportunities, research and development  investments, and go-to-market capabilities
• Reduce operational complexity
• Enhance strategic flexibility, pursue partnerships, and develop independent mergers and acquisition strategies
• Set distinct capital allocation policies

2. SECURITY
 
Michael A. Brown will continue as the President and CEO of Symantec focused on security. 

• This business will focus on Symantec and Norton end point security and cyber security services. 
• According to Gartner, Symantec is the market leader at $4.2 billion with 18.7% market share, almost double of the nearest competitor McAfee at 8.7%, followed by IBM at 5.7%.  The market is expected to reach $38 billion by 2018. 

In the security segment, Symantec helped pioneer anti-hacking technologies and its Norton product line, made it one of the best known security vendors.  However, it has increasingly found itself out of step with the security industry. Symantec faces escalating threats from professional hackers who rage battles beyond traditional security protection of viruses and cyberthreats.  The recent data breaches at Target Corp, eBay, Home Depot and JPMorgan show how hackers are finding new sophisticated ways against advanced detection systems.

On top of that, Symantec’s anti-virus software which is attached to PC sales took a beating with the PC slum, as its software was often bundled with the new computers.  Symantec had failed to catch onto the mobile market boom with mobile security. If Symantec wants to be successful in security, it must gear itself towards where more than half of the market spends and the fastest-growing security areas  of services, which includes consulting, outsourcing and implementation. 

3. INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

John Gannon will be General Manager of the new information management business. 

• This business will focus on backup and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery, storage management and information availability services. 
• Symantec claims to serve 75% of Fortune 500, estimated at 15% market share. This market is expected to grow to $16 billion by 2018.  Symantec’s appliance products have a 27% year on year growth and its back up products are among the leaders in the segment.

The information management market is likely to grow with new investments in virtualization, software defined data center technologies and cloud solutions.  Increasing data growth requires technology for data management from back up, recovery, access, storage anywhere and everywhere.

4. WHAT'S NEXT

The split up companies are up for grabs from EMC, HP, Cisco, Netapp and private investors.  It would be interesting to watch who will buy which company up, depending on the investors' focus on revenue from the cash cow or growth.

Technology - the secret to winning F1

Technology events have never gotten more exciting!  We had a total sensory experience at IBM ASEAN’s Xcite event with Infiniti Red Bull Racing Team.

Al Peasland (Head of Technical Partnerships, Red Bull Racing) was our speaker who gave us a TED-style sharing of the partnership between IBM and Red Bull Racing.  We experienced the Infiniti Red Bull spirit of fun and philosophy of “performance and reliability” with Al’s passionate delivery and interactive presentation.

 

Performance is great but if it doesn't happen when you need it, you cannot consistently win the race.  If it is just  about reliability, you may not become the best without pushing performance.  Both are important to keep staying ahead and winning.

Al shared, “Platform Computing is the back bone infrastructure for high performance computing, which helped Red Bull Racing with the design of the car, the analytics and the race strategy.”  It is used to plan into the future, to create all the what if scenarios and to predict what may happen in the two hour race.

When the single focus is to win races and championships, every element of the design and manufacture of Formula One racing cars is critical. With Formula One regulations becoming more stringent each year, Red Bull Racing is designing the entire car in a virtual world and parts are machined directly from 3D CAD models. Red Bull Racing also collects massive amounts of data from wind tunnel testing and from the car during races. These processes demand extensive use of simulation and data analytics, and a first class IT infrastructure.

Infiniti Red Bull Racing is ahead of the league that is embracing Platform Computing, a software from IBM Systems & Technology Group.  Also sometimes known Elastic Storage for Software Defined Environment. It helps to maximize the potential of computing power by pooling resources, managing them efficiently across multiple groups, so that one can run many iterations, simulations and analytics to get business results fast.  This is the winning formula to harness the benefits of unstructured data and data explosion.

We are glad to be the technology innovation partner that drives the winning Formula One car.  Technology - platform computing technology - is the secret to winning!

Catch Al's interview: https://plus.google.com/101708759635909645335/posts/MmgQDhqx3Yj
Read more: http://www.slideshare.net/annephey/blog-2014-1016-infiniti-red-bulls-secrets-to-winning-f1-races

HP Splits Up. Is Two Better Than One?

The IT industry is just getting more exciting.

Hot off the heels of IBM’s sale of its x86 server business to Lenovo, providing the momentum for Lenovo to repeat its success in 2005 when it acquired IBM’s PC division to become the number one vendor, HP makes a major announcement to spin off its PC and printer division into a separate company.

1.WHAT IS THE SPLIT
 

Former chief executive Leo Apotheker had proposed the move in 2011, 6 years after IBM sold its PC business.  It happened at the same time that HP’s disastrous acquisition of the British software company Autonomy.  Eventually, HP held on to its PC business amid shareholder pressure, resulting in Apotheker’s departure and Whitman’s appointment.  Meg Whitman who joined 3 years ago to turn HP’s fortunes around had dismissed her predecessor’s plan to carve up the firm but has now changed her mind in the fourth year of her five-year turnaround plan.

HP expects to complete the  split of HP into two public companies by end of 2015 fiscal year.  Shareholders will automatically own shares in both companies.

• Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to cover corporate hardware and services, which Whitman will head up, and
• HP Inc to comprise the PC and printer units, to be headed by Dion Weisler (the current executive vice-president of HP's printing and personal computing division). Whitman will be the chairman of the HP Inc board, thereby retaining influence in both businesses.

2.WHY SPLIT

"The decision to separate into two market-leading companies underscores our commitment to the turnaround plan," said Whitman. "It will provide each new company with the independence, focus, financial resources, and flexibility they need to adapt quickly to market and customer dynamics, while generating long-tern value for shareholders."

3. IMPACT OF SPLIT 

HP’s role in the IT market has been becoming increasingly unclear – with parts of its business moving toward growth areas, while others are being optimized to compete on the last era’s competitive battlefield.  This left the company in a tough spot, where new innovation efforts were often overshadowed by large legacy challenges.  HP has been addressing this through aggressive restructuring, ultimately shedding as many as 55,000 jobs by the end of FY2015. 

Whether HP’s efforts to reduce complexity and be more nimble with two large companies remains to be seen.  There are still many of the HP businesses that are not synergistic with different levers for success or where potential partners are unable to fit strategically with the company.

4. WHAT'S NEXT

Just when HP struck out at IBM by blatantly advertising that IBM customers and business partners should be worried about the x86 business sale to Lenovo, HP has now plunged into deeper uncertainty with their own company split.

It would be important for HP to quickly establish how different they will be after the split and what is the desired perception of HP to the world.