This week, I attended the first quarterly IBM technical directions conference in 2013, hosted at Emulex UK HQ in Wokingham.
John Easton, IBM Distinguished Engineer, opened the first session and presented IBM’s position on the future of Enterprise IT and the transition away from “systems of record” toward “systems of engagement”.
Emulex as guest speaker and key IBM partner for OEM onboard networking and I/O cards, explained the importance of Overlay networks: As more and more VMs are deployed on individual Intel servers, networking has become more complicated. The core problem is that the IP address for a server has been used for both the server’s identity and its location. Because VMs move and they need to retain their identity, the demands for an elastic, dynamic and scalable virtual environment have pushed Layer 2 networks to their breaking point. Overlay Networks addresses the requirements of Layer 2 and Layer 3 data center networks in the presence of VMs.
Robert Moon presented the case for IBM Pureflex as the platform of choice for VDI. IBM Smartcloud desktop infrastructure addresses the issues that are relevant to Virtual desktop, maximum processing power, memory and storage performance. At the same time it was designed to support multiple operating systems and multiple hypervisor environments.
Dr John Brooker from Texas Memory Systems gave an update on what the IBM acquisition brings to the market and how IBM’s Storwize technology works so well incorporating SSD storage arrays.
Tim Jeffcoat, The new IBM product Manager for System x in the UK & Ireland covered the latest updates and future products from the “X” platform, and what Intel’s Haswell processor technology will mean to the IBM “X architecture” evolution. In addition we were given an insight into IBM’s rack server chassis innovations that will offer much easier component access.
