IBM – Digital IT News

Live GPFS Support Includes Cirata Data Migrator 2.5 for IBM

Taylor Graham — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 15:00:25 +0000

Cirata announced support for IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS), a cluster file system used for IBM Spectrum Scale data lakes. The newly released Live GPFS support, included in Cirata Data Migrator 2.5, significantly reduces latency between storage changes and replication or migration results, while also improving the performance and scalability of GPFS-resident data assets migrating to the cloud.

Cirata Data Migrator lowers data latency while enhancing data migration performance for better data integration outcomes. The new Cirata Live GPFS capability initiates data transfer from a source GPFS file system as changes occur, without disruption to the storage environment. Ideally suited for cloud migrations, disaster recovery processes and continuous data migration use cases, Cirata Data Migrator with Live GPFS not only improves migration scale and performance but also supports fine-grained control and audit logging for assured compliance in increasingly multicloud data management environments.

According to Gartner®, “81% of respondents in organizations using public cloud said their organizations were using more than one cloud service provider (CSP).” “As the number of CSPs an organization uses increases, the complexity of managing them also increases. This can have negative consequences, such as performance issues associated with data latency, unplanned cost overruns or data egress fees, and difficulties with data integration.”(¹⁾

“Modern multicloud workloads require high performance access to a common set of data to support scale-out storage and high availability. This is performed by IBM GPFS with great efficiency,” said Paul Scott-Murphy, Chief Technology Officer, Cirata. “By supporting this valued IBM GPFS capability as a Live source, Cirata Data Migrator gives organizations leveraging GPFS-resident data assets the confidence that they can flexibly migrate and replicate data with high performance and control to nearly any target, anywhere.”

Cirata Data Migrator with Live GPFS delivers the following benefits:

Reduces latency: By taking action immediately after change, Cirata Data Migrator minimizes the latency between source storage modifications and the actions to transfer or modify content at the targets. This can minimize recovery point objectives (RPO), and assist in architecting solutions with zero recovery time objectives (RTO).
Improves scale: Cirata Data Migrator avoids the need to repeatedly scan a source file system to identify change when Live migration is in effect. This is particularly beneficial for systems with very large numbers of storage items, allowing vastly more scalable outcomes and minimizing the overhead imposed on storage.
Enhances performance: By avoiding the need to repeatedly scan source storage, Cirata Data Migrator with Live GPFS avoids an entire class of overhead that solutions relying on scheduled jobs incur. The result is higher performance, and reduced computational overheads.
Enables finer control: Cirata Data Migrator offers fine-grained control of which data assets participate in migration. The Live GPFS feature incorporates these mechanisms natively, so that techniques like path mapping and pattern-based exclusion of file system content are incorporated into the core processing performed during data transfer, exposing all of the fine-grained selectivity directly to users if wanted.
Delivers auditable, accurate outcomes: Every action taken in response to changing source data is logged in auditable form, complementing the detailed reporting already available from migration verification to help ensure that migration outcomes are complete and accurate.

Cirata Data Migrator is a fully automated solution that automates Hadoop data transfer and integration and moves on-premises HDFS data, Hive metadata, local filesystem, or cloud data sources to any cloud or on-premises environment, even while those datasets are under active change. Cirata Data Migrator requires zero changes to applications or business operations and moves data of any scale without production system downtime, business disruption, and with zero risk of data loss. Migration targets supported include the Hadoop Distributed File System, Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service, Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2, Google Cloud Storage, IBM Cloud Object Storage and Oracle Object Store.

Cirata Data Migrator 2.5 is available now including Live GPFS support; click here for more information.

Cirata Data Migrator Accessible Through Google Cloud Marketplace

¹ Gartner, How to Optimize for Multicloud Data Management Deployments, Masud Miraz, Adam Ronthal, 13 May 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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Consumers Surveyed Welcome AI to Improve Shopping Experience

Taylor Graham — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 18:00:27 +0000

Entering 2024, the retail scene is in flux, driven by shifts in consumer preferences and advancements in technology. A recent study from the IBM Institute for Business Value highlights that modern consumers desire personalized shopping journeys, encompassing product variety, detailed information, diverse payment options, and a seamless blend of in-store and online experiences tailored to their preferences. Generative AI emerges as a solution to meet these expectations, crafting retail environments that are both intuitive and finely attuned to individual needs. IBM’s focus at NRF’24 revolves around AI-driven solutions, showcasing their commitment to addressing these evolving retail dynamics.

Consumers Surveyed Welcome AI-Driven Advancements to Improve the Retail Experience

A global IBM Institute for Business Value study has laid bare the discrepancy between consumer expectations and the current state of retail offerings. The “Revolutionize retail with AI everywhere: Consumers won’t wait” study, unveiled ahead of NRF, surveyed nearly 20,000 individuals worldwide, revealing a dissatisfaction with retail experiences. Just 9% of consumers surveyed said they are content with in-store shopping and just 14% are content with online shopping.

Technology could play an integral role in enhancing the overall shopping experience. Most consumers surveyed (59%) said they would like to use AI applications as they shop and 4 in 5 consumers who haven’t used the technology for shopping reported being interested in trying it, including in product research (86%), deal hunting (79%) and customer service (82%). Personalization and targeted offerings present opportunities for retailers, with 52% of surveyed consumers interested in receiving information, advertisements, and offerings from stores that are relevant to their specific interests.

Still, there remains a clear satisfaction gap for current AI assistant users surveyed. Only about one-third of consumers surveyed who have used virtual assistants are satisfied with the experience and nearly 20% were so disappointed that they don’t want to use virtual assistants again, signaling a mismatch between current tech offerings and shopper expectations.

IBM, Samsung, and Workday partner to empower frontline retail workers through technology

As the retail sector grapples with inflation, rising labor costs, shifting workforce expectations, and hiring challenges, C-Suite executives are confronted with challenges and mounting pressure to boost revenue and expand margins.

IBM has collaborated with Samsung and Workday to provide a strategic answer—Workforce Experience (WEx). The bespoke retail solution combines the power of IBM Consulting’s iX application design and watsonx AI capabilities with Samsung mobile devices, while leveraging Workday’s Human Capital Management (HCM) and Workday workforce management applications, to equip frontline retail workers with technology to streamline operations.

WEx was built to promote associate and manager productivity, boost employee retention and improve customer satisfaction. The solution uses automation to help solve common challenges like task management and employee onboarding, and generative AI to measure store metrics and performance and help associates with product availability. It is designed to help reduce the time to train associates using a centralized, easy-to-use interface with nudges and notifications and offers on-the-go training and development opportunities through Workday. WEx also offers store associates more detailed information about product availability, in turn helping the customer.

At NRF, IBM will demonstrate how WEx can equip employees with technology to help them provide the level of service that customers expect. Stop by booth #5006 at NRF to see a demo.

Enhancing the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry with SAP

In addition to enhancing the customer experience and helping retail employees better meet customer expectations, AI has an important back-office role to play across the industry. At NRF, IBM and SAP will discuss how they seek to combine their expertise to help CPG and retail clients enhance their supply chain, finance operations, sales and services using AI and gen AI.

The goal of the AI-powered solutions is to address the complexities of direct store delivery business process and product portfolio management. IBM Consulting and SAP are already working with CPG clients worldwide to gather detailed requirements to create secured and scalable AI solutions that can be integrated with the SAP Direct Distribution solution.

The new solutions would be designed to help CPG companies, wholesale distributors and retailers more efficiently manage store-level assortments, improve product distribution, and drive incremental revenue by using AI and gen AI to:

Enhance transportation planning and execution — By incorporating data such as weather, traffic and local events into SAP Direct Distribution, CPG companies could enhance delivery routes to help reduce costs, and lower their carbon footprint.
Optimize store-level assortments – The solutions could use the market dynamics of each store, sales patterns, anticipated demand and current product mix to make product recommendations and include preliminary planning so enough products are added to the assortment to help maximize sales. Joint clients of SAP and IBM Consulting could be able to manage their last-mile distribution to help effectively identify the most profitable selections and minimize waste.
Automate order settlement – CPG companies could use intelligent workflows to help proactively achieve operational efficiencies and increase settlement accuracy based on AI in the SAP Direct Distribution last-mile distribution component.

IBM will also use NRF to demonstrate various aspects of our watsonx generative AI platform, particularly watsonx.governance, a powerful set of tools to help manage enterprise-wide governance processes and control risk. To see how watsonx can help retailers, enhance from customer engagement and personalization to operational efficiency, stop by booth #5006 at NRF to see a demo.

Revolutionizing the grocery aisle with Kroger

Looking beyond NRF’24, gen AI can help transform the way businesses across sectors operate, and grocery retail is no exception. The consumer sector is ready to embrace this disruptive technology: 42% of retail CEOs and 59% of consumer products CEOs expect AI—including gen AI, deep learning, and machine learning—to be the technology that can best deliver desired results in the next three years.

Following NRF, join IBM on January 23rd for the latest installment in our retail-focused LinkedIn Live series. Cathy Reese, Senior Partner for Data & Technology Transformation services at IBM, will speak with Jamie Lancaster, Vice President, Contact Centers and G&A Expense Optimization at Kroger, about the gen AI opportunity in grocery, current and potential use cases and how industry players are navigating the implementation and integration journey.

Looking ahead

As businesses across the retail industry gear up for 2024, it’s clear they need to be prepared to meet customers’ changing demands as ecommerce evolves and in-store commerce recovers. Gen AI can play an instrumental role in that preparation, and IBM is looking forward to helping retailers make the most of this emerging technology. To learn more about how IBM is showing up at NRF’24, stay updated via the NRF webpage.

To review how the consumers surveyed responded download the recent IBM Institute for Business Value study, “Revolutionize retail with AI everywhere: Consumers won’t wait” study.

Scope 3 GHG Emissions Operationalized Through IBM Envizi ESG Suite

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IBM Storage Scale System 6000 Unleashes the Potential of Data and AI

Taylor Graham — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 13:30:55 +0000

IBM introduced the new IBM Storage Scale System 6000, a cloud-scale global data platform designed to meet today’s data-intensive and AI workload demands, and the latest offering in the IBM Storage for Data and AI portfolio.

For the seventh consecutive year and counting, IBM is a 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Leader, recognized for its vision and execution. (¹⁾ The new IBM Storage Scale System 6000 seeks to build on IBM’s leadership position with an enhanced high-performance parallel file system designed for data-intensive use cases. It provides up to 7M IOPs and up to 256GB/s throughput for read-only workloads per system in a 4U (four rack units) footprint. (²⁾

To leverage the economic value of both foundation and traditional AI models, businesses must focus on the data – their current capacity and growth forecasts, where the data resides, how it’s secured and accessed, and how to optimize future data storage investments.

“The potential of today’s new era of AI can only be fully realized, in my opinion, if organizations have a strategy to unify data from multiple sources in near real-time without creating numerous copies of data and going through constant iterations of data ingest,” said Denis Kennelly, general manager, IBM Storage. “IBM Storage Scale System 6000 gives clients the ability to do just that – brings together data from core, edge, and cloud into a single platform with optimized performance for GPU workloads.”

The IBM Storage Scale System 6000 is optimized for storing semi-structured and unstructured data including video, imagery, text, instrumentation data, etc., that is generated daily and accelerates an organization’s digital footprint across hybrid environments. With the IBM Storage Scale System clients can:

Expect greater data efficiencies and economies of scale with the addition of IBM FlashCore Modules (FCM), to be incorporated in 1H 2024:

New maximum capacity NVMe FCM will provide capacity efficiency with 70% lower cost and 53% less energy per TB vs. IBM’s previous maximum capacity flash drives for IBM Storage Scale System. (³⁾ This can help clients realize the full performance of NVMe with the cost advantages of Quad-level Cell (QLC). (⁴⁾
Powerful inline hardware-accelerated data compression and encryption to help keep client data secured even in multi-user, multi-tenant environments.
Storage Scale System 6000 with FCM will support 2.5x the amount of data in the same floor space than the previous generation system. (⁵⁾

Accelerate the adoption and operationalization of AI workloads with IBM watsonx:

Engineered with a new NVMeoF turbo tier, new parallel multi-tenant data isolation and IBM patented computational storage drives, this is designed to provide more performance security and efficiency for AI workloads.
Storage Scale software, the global data platform for unstructured data that powers the Scale System 6000, connects data with an open ecosystem of multi-vendor storage options including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud and other public clouds, in addition to IBM Storage Tape.

Gain faster access to data with over 2.5x the GB/s throughput and 2x IOPs performance of market leading competitors (6):

High-processing throughput and access speed with multiple concurrent AI and data-intensive workloads that can be run to meet a range of use cases.

The Benefits of IBM Storage Scale in Applied AI at the University of Queensland

The University of Queensland (UQ) is a world-class research institution that has significantly accelerated a wide range of workloads providing faster access to data and improved efficiency and capabilities using the IBM Storage Scale global data platform and IBM Storage Scale System. Examples of some of the research where IBM Storage is used include applied AI for the characterization of neurodegenerative diseases and in the search for more effective and flexible vaccine technologies.

“With our current Storage Scale Systems 3500, we are helping decrease time to discovery and increase research productivity for a growing variety of scientific disciplines. For AI research involving medical image analysis, we have decreased latency of access by as much as 60% compared to our previous storage infrastructure. For genomics and complex fluid dynamics workloads, we have increased throughput by as much as 70%,” said Jake Carroll, Chief Technology Officer, Research Computing Centre, The University of Queensland, Australia. “We get all the benefits of a high-speed parallel file system inside our supercomputing resources with the data management transparency and global data access that the IBM Storage Scale software provides.”

Carroll added, “IBM’s Storage Scale System 6000 should be a gamechanger for us. With the specs that I’ve seen, by doubling the performance and increasing the efficiency, we would be able to ask our scientific research questions with higher throughput, but with a lower TCO and lower power consumption per IOP, in the process.”

Accelerating AI with the IBM Storage Scale System and NVIDIA Technology

The Storage Scale System 6000 has the ability to create an information supply chain from an NVIDIA AI solution to other AI workloads independent of where they are located. IBM’s new NVMeoF turbo tier has been engineered for small files like those collected from remote devices or to provide access to smaller transactions like data lake or lakehouse analytics so they can be integrated into an NVIDIA solution.

The Storage Scale System 6000 supports NVIDIA Magnum IOTM GPUDirect® Storage (GDS) with a direct path between GPU memory and storage. It has also been designed to increase performance with data movement IO when GDS is enabled. Utilizing NVIDIA ConnectX-7 NICs, the Scale System 6000 supports up to 16 ports of 100Gb RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), 200Gb/s and/or 400Gb/s InfiniBand, or a combination of both to increase performance between nodes or directly to NVIDIA GPUs. To learn more about how IBM Storage can accelerate access and provide a global data platform with NVIDIA AI solutions, visit the website here.

For more information on IBM Storage Scale System, please visit our website here.

Clients can select the level of desired support at the time of sale through IBM Expert Care with a choice between Basic and Advanced tiers. Read here for more.

Visit the IBM website for more information HERE.

50TB Native Capacity, Highest Tape Storage, Developed by Fujifilm and IBM

¹ Gartner disclaimers: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage, 19 October 2022, Julia Palmer, et. Al. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
² The performance considerations were obtained by running sample programs in a controlled environment with standard hardware/software configurations and testing procedures. Performance for IOPs is obtained using non protected tier for capability supported via special request. Since performance varies with configuration, program characteristics, and other installation and environment factors, results obtained in other operating environments may vary. IBM® does not represent, warrant, or guarantee that a user will achieve the same or similar results in the user’s environment.
³ Capacity efficiency improvements based on comparison of new 38TB Flash Core Modular (FCM) drives with up to 2:1 inline compression vs. previous 30TB max capacity drives. Cost per TB based on standard list price of drives (list pricing available upon request) and energy usage based on specification of drives (https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/JBVQYVXB).
⁴ Adshead, A. (2023, March 14). QLC edges into mainstream, but what are its advantages? ComputerWeekly.com. https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/QLC-edges-into-mainstream-but-what-are-its-advantages
⁵ The 4 rack unit Storage Scale System 6000 capacity is based on a configuration using the 38TB FCM drives with up to 2:1 inline compression supported in 1H 2024 with 900 TB / rack unit of floor space vs previous generation 2 rack unit Scale System 3500 using 30TB Flash drives with 360 TB / rack unit of floor space.
⁶ The performance considerations were obtained by running sample programs in a controlled environment with standard hardware/software configurations and testing procedures. Performance for IOPs on IBM Storage Scale System 6000 is obtained using non protected tier for capability available via special request. Competitor comparisons are extrapolated from publicly available information comparing market leading vendors/competitors defined by Gartner magic quadrant (https://community.ibm.com/community/user/storage/blogs/david-wohlford1/2022/10/21/ibm-is-a-leader-in-2022-gartner-magic-quadrant) Since performance varies with configuration, program characteristics, and other installation and environment factors, results obtained in other operating environments may vary. IBM® does not represent, warrant, or guarantee that a user will achieve the same or similar results in the user’s environment.

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Scope 3 GHG Emissions Operationalized Through IBM Envizi ESG Suite

Taylor Graham — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 13:30:19 +0000

IBM announced it can help organizations accelerate the capture, calculation, and analysis of Scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through the integration of NLP in the IBM Envizi ESG Suite. The new text classification capabilities are designed to help enable a leap forward in efficiency and accuracy by helping organizations automatically ingest, organize, and manage the spend data required for emissions calculations and external disclosures.

New findings released as a preview of the IBM 2023 Sustainable Business Snapshot(¹⁾, conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of IBM, revealed that there’s a perception gap among corporate sustainability professionals, including sustainability and IT decisionmakers. 93% of respondents think their company is somewhat or very mature in using data to track sustainability progress. But only 45% say they are ready to report on Scope 3 emissions.

IBM Envizi has been helping organizations to collect, calculate, analyze and report on GHG emissions for over a decade. IBM Envizi offers coverage for all 15 Scope 3 categories, using a calculation engine to apply GHG Protocol calculation methods that are underpinned by a robust data management system. It includes automated data capture, supplier survey data capture, Scope 3 emissions factor libraries, reporting framework templates, a dedicated Scope 3 analytics dashboard, audit tools and functionality to support supplier benchmarking analysis.

The new functionality in Envizi announced today helps address one of the key challenges organizations face with Scope 3 emissions, which is the categorization of spend data drawn from financial or ERP systems.

With the addition of automated text classification using NLP, IBM Envizi can help streamline this process by aggregating, managing, categorizing and preparing spend data, ultimately to help produce a unified and up-to-date dataset that maps to country and industry-specific emissions factors. To complement this functionality, IBM Envizi now includes an embedded spend-based emissions factor library that is harmonized across over 180 countries, creating uniformity in Scope 3 calculations for purchased good and services. These datasets are designed to help organizations to produce their emissions calculations quickly, accurately and efficiently.

“Growing regulatory requirements and external interests are driving organizations to disclose GHG emissions, including those from Scope 3,” said Christina Shim, Vice President and Global Head, Product Management and Strategy, IBM Sustainability Software. “As requirements increase and as organizations prioritize enhancing operational insights, so does the need for robust, auditable data management, calculation, and reporting processes. IBM Envizi is now integrated with the new capabilities to help organizations seamlessly garner insights from spend data to facilitate Scope 3 emissions calculations for ESG reporting.”

For example, a manufacturer may buy computer and electronic components from various suppliers. In one entry, these components may be recorded as ‘chips,’ and in another, they may be called ‘hard drives.’ Ultimately, they all need to be in the category of ‘computer and electronic components’ so the correct emissions factor can be applied. This application of text classification can help to automatically categorize potentially thousands of lines of spend data so teams can focus on higher value work.

IBM Envizi complements IBM’s existing portfolio of sustainability solutions and consulting expertise, including IBM Planning Analytics, IBM Supply Chain Intelligence Suite, IBM Maximo Application Suite, and IBM Turbonomic, that help organizations set, operationalize, and drive their environmental sustainability goals.

You can view a preview of the report HERE. For more information about the IBM Envizi ESG Suite, click HERE.

Getting Sweet on Sustainability: Conserving while Computing

Methodology for the Morning Consult “Sustainable Business Snapshot:” This poll was conducted online by Morning Consult in August 2023 among a sample of 3,250 global business leaders, employed at companies with 1,000 or more employees. The sample includes 250 participants from 13 markets, including US, UK, UAE, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, and Spain. Results have a margin of error of +/- 3 points.

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50TB Native Capacity, Highest Tape Storage, Developed by Fujifilm and IBM

Taylor Graham — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 15:00:48 +0000

FUJIFILM Corporation and IBM announced the development of a 50TB native tape storage system, featuring the world’s highest native data tape cartridge capacity(1). Fujifilm has commenced production of a high-density tape cartridge for use with IBM’s newest enterprise tape drive, the TS1170. The sixth-generation IBM 3592 JF tape cartridge incorporates a newly developed technology featuring fine hybrid magnetic particles to enable higher data storage capacity.

Innovations in achieving 50TB Native Capacity

Fujifilm has succeeded in achieving this innovative cartridge capacity by evolving the technologies developed in previous tape generations. This involved enhancing both the areal recording density (the amount of data that can be recorded per square inch) and the overall recording area (the surface area capable of recording data).

Nanoparticle Design Technology: Fine hybrid magnetic particles have been newly developed by combining the technologies used in the next-generation Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) magnetic particles and the Barium Ferrite (BaFe) particles that are currently used in high-capacity data storage tapes. Reduction in the size of the magnetic particles and enhancement in their magnetic properties significantly improves the areal recording density.
High-dispersion technology for magnetic particles prevents the aggregation of individual ultrafine magnetic particles and allows for a more even dispersion of the particles.
Improved thin layer coating technology achieves a more uniform and smoother tape surface, resulting in improved signal-to-noise ratio.

A 15% longer tape per data cartridge compared to the previous fifth generation(²⁾ is realized by using a thinner and stronger base film, which is for the support of the magnetic layer.

AI enhanced analytics are helping organizations derive value from exponentially increasing volumes of “big data” and prompting the need for long term, cost-effective, high-capacity data storage. With the TS1170 drive and 3592 JF tape cartridge, data-intensive organizations including growing cloud service providers can take advantage of the increased capacity of 3592 JF for long-term retention and security of these massive data sets.

Kei Nagata, Deputy General Manager of the Industrial Products Division at Fujifilm, says:
With 50TB native capacity, 2.5 times the capacity of the previous highest-capacity tape cartridges(²⁾, Fujifilm believes this breakthrough demonstrates the future potential of tape technology. The IBM 3592 JF tape cartridge is yet another milestone in many years of joint research and development with IBM, and we are honored to be the manufacturer of this product.”

Alistair Symon, Vice President of Storage Systems Development at IBM, says:
“The advanced technology in the IBM 3592 JF tape cartridge will enable customers to realize high densities, which facilitates storage cost optimization while maintaining performance and time to data. This is the first tape storage medium with 50TB native capacity, and it demonstrates tape’s viability as an optimal choice for data protection, active archives and long-term retention in scientific data, industrial data collection and cloud service provider environments.”

The innovation of the IBM 3592 JF tape cartridge, only available on the new IBM TS1170 Tape Drive, provides the ability to store up to 150TB of data on a single tape cartridge with a 3:1 compression ratio, enabling clients to achieve ultra-high data storage on the TS1170.

To learn more about Fujifilm, click here and IBM, here.

IBM z16 Announced for Real-time AI for Transaction Processing at Scale

*¹ Based on comparison of available tape cartridge technology from the Linear Tape Open (LTO) format with LTO-9 capacity of 18TB and existing IBM Enterprise tape cartridge JE capacity of a maximum 20TB, as of August 29, 2023.

*² The fifth-generation 3592 JE Tape cartridge.

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Dizzion Announces IBM Cloud for Financial Services

Digital IT News Editors — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 23:32:31 +0000

Dizzion announced the release of Dizzion’s new Digital Workspaces for Financial Services available on IBM Cloud for Financial Services. With IBM’s built-in security and compliance capabilities, third-party partners, institutions, and vendors can protect sensitive systems and data and unlock the modern workforce to create flexibility in how and where they engage hybrid, distributed, and third and fourth-party teams.

Today, financial institutions are increasingly charged with managing risk, security, compliance, and data privacy, as they look to address the evolving regulatory requirements of the financial services industry. By offering its Digital Workspace solution on IBM Cloud for Financial Services, IBM is helping Dizzion address the challenges of securing hybrid workforces and mission-critical workloads, while prioritizing resiliency and performance and helping more efficiently demonstrate regulatory compliance.

Dizzion’s Digital Workspaces for Financial Services, collaborated on through the IBM and VMware Joint Innovation Lab, aims to offer an exceptional value proposition – from efficient migration to this framework for existing clients to providing a solutions for new challenges and opportunities for new clients. The offering has been validated by the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services, an industry-defined security and compliance control framework. This framework was built in collaboration with the IBM Financial Services Cloud Council, a 130-plus member group representing more than 70 entities to help mitigate systemic risk across the financial services industry. Only technology providers that have evidenced compliance with the Framework are eligible to deliver offerings with the IBM Cloud for Financial Services Validated designation.

“By leveraging the common controls framework of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, Dizzion is able to support financial institutions and their third-party vendors unlike ever before,” said Steve Prather, CEO of Dizzion. “We are now able to address specific financial services compliance requirements and drive rapid cloud adoption while exponentially increasing innovation for our clients across the sector.”

“Financial Institutions are moving to the cloud, creating complexity in accessing their mission critical applications while still providing more secure access to their sensitive data,” said Bharath Rangarajan, General Manager of VDI/Desktop-as-a-Service, VMware. “Dizzion, supported by IBM and VMware, aims to solve these challenges by delivering a performant and secure, managed DaaS solution powered by VMware Horizon with their new Digital Workspaces for Financial Services solution.”

The innovative capabilities of IBM Cloud for Financial Services provide a broad foundation for this collaboration to address the industry’s unique cybersecurity and evolving compliance requirements. Designed for regulated workloads, the platform aims to help address regulatory barriers that can impede IT landscape and modernization efforts.

“Today’s workplace is continuously transforming as enterprises need to accelerate digital transformation to further bridge the divide between digital and physical borders to enable the flexibility to work from anywhere and everywhere,” said Alan Peacock, General Manager, IBM Cloud Platform. “However, security capabilities need to be an integral part of this transformation journey to protect sensitive data without interrupting business performance. IBM Cloud for Financial Services is designed to deliver the levels of resiliency, security, performance, and compliance needed to drive application modernization and help improve customer experience.”

IBM Cloud infrastructure and VMware’s Horizon software helps Dizzion support financial services institutions and their third-party vendors help optimize their end-user operations and enhance data security, as part of their digital transformation. Dizzion, IBM, and VMware work together towards the goal of empowering the financial services sector enhance acceleration of cloud adoption with advanced levels of resiliency, performance, security, and agility.

For more information visit the website here.

Financial Institutions Findings from Netwrix 2022 Cloud Security Report

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Digital Realty Selects IBM Envizi ESG to Transform Data into Insights

Taylor Graham — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 18:00:37 +0000

IBM announced that Digital Realty is using the IBM Envizi ESG Suite to collect, analyze and report on its environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance across its portfolio of 300+ data centers across 50+ metros across 27 countries on six continents.

According to an IBM Institute for Business Value report (“The ESG data conundrum“), while 95% of organizations surveyed have developed ESG propositions, only 10% say they have made significant progress toward their goals, and 73% cited a struggle to manage an overload of manual data.

Digital Realty is one of the largest global providers of cloud and carrier-neutral data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions for major metros globally including Chicago, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, London, New York, Northern Virginia, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo. With a commitment to sustainability and environmental stewardship, the company will use IBM Envizi as a centralized hub for collecting, managing, and deriving insights from its ESG data, to track progress, identify areas for improvement, report performance to stakeholders, and accommodate disclosure requirements. The software provides a comprehensive and integrated solution for managing ESG performance, environmental impact, and sustainability goals.

“By leveraging the capabilities of IBM Envizi, we will transform our ability to collect, analyze and report on our ESG performance across our global data center portfolio. It will help track and manage our environmental performance, while enabling us to better meet the sustainability needs of our customers and other stakeholders,” says Aaron Binkley, VP Sustainability, Digital Realty.

“Organizations globally are simply buried in a massive amount of ESG-related data—from operations, sensors on factory floors, and more. But it is often siloed across databases, spreadsheets, and business units,” says Christina Shim, Vice President, Global Head of Product Management and Strategy, IBM Sustainability Software. “The IBM Envizi ESG Suite helps our clients, like Digital Realty, gain insights from data to fuel smarter, more sustainable decisions every day.”

Working with IBM, Digital Realty uses Envizi to help manage and accelerate sustainability initiatives across its portfolio. For example:

Create a single system of record for ESG data: Envizi enables Digital Realty to streamline the collection of data from a wide range of sources such as utility data, power usage efficiency (PUE), renewable energy certificates, waste data, business travel, purchased goods and services. This makes it easier for Digital Realty to provide consistent data for reporting, analysis and decision making – for example, to support Scope 1, 2 and 3 GHG emission calculations and to create its annual ESG report.
Analyze data to inform sustainability decision-making: Digital Realty can apply Envizi’s advanced analytics to transform this data into insights on the performance of its portfolio, which helps drive better decisions and address sustainability goals. For example, Envizi could help Digital Realty assess its current portfolio and drive change in its three focus areas: designing and building more sustainable data centers, finding new ways to power them, and driving improvements in how it operates them.
Streamline ESG and sustainability reporting: Digital Realty is committed to transparent ESG disclosures and reports its performance annually, including progress against its SBTi target to reduce its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 68% and Scope 3 emissions by 24% by 2030. Envizi’s ESG reporting capabilities is designed to make it easier to streamline these reporting processes, with reporting questions and responses managed within a single software interface.

IBM itself is a user of Envizi for inputting, storing, and managing operational data such as energy and water consumption; planning and tracking energy and water conservation projects; and supporting external reporting and disclosures. IBM is also an important client of Digital Realty, hosting part of its portfolio of global data centers with them. The IBM Global Real Estate team is sharing insights and experience on Envizi with Digital Realty as they advance towards more sustainable operations.

The IBM Envizi ESG Suite is part of IBM’s portfolio of sustainability solutions and consulting expertise, including the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, IBM Turbonomic, IBM Planning Analytics, IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator and IBM LinuxONE, that help organizations set, operationalize, and achieve their ESG goals.

For more information about IBM, please visit the website HERE and for Digital Realty HERE.

IBM Cloud and Wasabi Collaborate to Drive Innovation Across Hybrid Cloud Environments

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IBM Cloud and Wasabi Collaborate to Drive Innovation Across Hybrid Cloud Environments

Taylor Graham — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:14:41 +0000

IBM and Wasabi Technologies announced they are collaborating to drive data innovation across hybrid cloud environments. This collaboration aims to allow enterprises to run applications across any environment – on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge – and help enable users to cost efficiently access and utilize key business data and analytics in real time. The Boston Red Sox will be the first to leverage the joint power of IBM Cloud Satellite® and Wasabi hot cloud storage, designed to improve the club’s operations across its entire business.

Both IBM Cloud and Wasabi are committed to delivering resiliency, performance, security, and compliance capabilities for their clients. Wasabi hot cloud storage does not charge for egress or API requests when they want to access their data, which Wasabi reports can help with cost predictability and savings for clients. Data can be stored and accessed how and when it is needed. The hybrid cloud approach delivered with IBM Cloud Satellite, can help clients manage cloud object storage and workloads running across environments from a single control point, using innovative security and controls no matter where data is being collected, processed or shared. The Red Sox plan to leverage Wasabi hot cloud storage across its hybrid cloud infrastructure while piloting IBM Cloud Satellite to house data including player video, analytics, surveillance data, IoT, and more, across Fenway Park and bring the flexibility and agility of public cloud services to its secured on-premises data center.

“Our critical data is growing at an incredible rate, so our organization is prioritizing a cost-effective and scalable approach to leverage cloud technology,” said Brian Shield, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Boston Red Sox. “The performance and cost reliability Wasabi delivers have already been advantageous for the Red Sox, and with the addition of IBM hybrid cloud technology we hope to take our digital initiatives to the next level. All of that ultimately funnels back to delivering a best-in-class fan experience.”

Through IBM Cloud and Wasabi, clients across all industries can take advantage of extended secured and open cloud services to help transform applications and workflows, managing security across any environment. This allows enterprises to store and access their data whether on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge.

“Wasabi is on a mission to store all the world’s data. Organizations storing an enormous amount of data, including sports organizations, need to be able to store it in an affordable, accessible way without being locked into a single vendor with exorbitant fees,” said David Friend, co-founder and chief executive officer, Wasabi Technologies. “Collaborating with IBM demonstrates Wasabi’s commitment in the cloud storage market and gives our customers a better way of managing their data cross locations.”

“In today’s digital-first world, data can be an organization’s greatest asset – empowering them with valuable insights that can transform business. Our collaboration with Wasabi technology will allow clients to re-imagine business processes enabled by data, while focusing on resiliency, performance, security and compliance. We are helping organizations across all industries, even those that are highly regulated, uncover game-changing insights from any environment, without sacrificing security,” said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform.

For more information about IBM Cloud Satellite visit the website HERE.

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Modernize Workloads in Regulated Industries with VMware and IBM

Taylor Graham — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 22:22:10 +0000

VMware Inc. and IBM announced at VMware Explore 2022 an expanded partnership to help global clients and partners modernize mission-critical workloads and expedite time to value in hybrid cloud environments. The expanded relationship includes IBM Consulting as a VMware GSI partner, the companies’ intent to deliver new jointly engineered IBM and VMware Cloud solutions and joint development and go to market. Together, IBM and VMware are planning to help clients in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and public sector address the cost, complexity and risk of migrating and modernizing mission-critical workloads in the cloud.

Companies, including those in regulated industries, are looking to modernize core business workloads to create better experiences for their clients and comply with industry regulations. Further, the current economic climate makes refactoring applications for cloud unrealistic for many organizations, driving increased emphasis on a more agile modernization strategy. The planned IBM and VMware offerings are intended to increase choice and flexibility for companies to execute their digital transformation strategies.

“In today’s market, organizations want to modernize and transform operations quickly. But modernization and innovation cannot come at the cost of security and trust built with clients,” said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Cloud Platform. “Together, IBM and VMware are supporting our mutual clients in regulated industries by offering something no two other companies are delivering– to more easily leverage hybrid cloud services securely — wherever and however they wish to run them.”

“With IBM and VMware, our customers get a combination of innovation and consulting experience based on decades of close collaboration and experience in meeting the business challenges of thousands of customers around the world,” said Mark Lohmeyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, cloud infrastructure business group, VMware. “This ongoing collaboration will enable us to better streamline the user experience for our mutual enterprise customers looking to run VMware mission critical workloads that require higher levels of security, resiliency and compliance support in financial services and regulated industries.”

Ecosystem partnerships such as the one between IBM and VMware are critical to helping some of the world’s most influential companies modernize their workloads with a focus on security and efficiency, while providing choice in how to deploy and manage them. Today’s news builds on the companies’ longstanding relationship, having collaborated over the past 20 years to help clients realize their technology goals.

The companies’ expanded partnership includes:

IBM Consulting named Global Systems Integrator (GSI) for VMware — As part of the expanded partnership, IBM Consulting is now a GSI Partner for VMware to help clients accelerate their business transformation and hybrid cloud journeys. IBM Consulting will provide services to migrate, modernize and manage clients’ most important workloads across any hybrid, multi-cloud environment in an open, more secured way. This is critical for clients who are running applications across more than one cloud and are looking for the deep skills and expertise required to help with the security, management and reliability needed in these environments.

Expansion of VMware and IBM Joint Innovation Fund — Since launching the IBM and VMware Joint Innovation Lab in 2018, 20 hybrid cloud and AI-focused projects have been completed to extend the capabilities of IBM Cloud and address client needs for mission-critical VMware workloads. For example, the creation of a VMware-enabled reference architecture was developed and integrated into IBM Cloud for Financial Services offerings. The Lab brings together engineering, sales, marketing and enablement capabilities from both companies and is a co-innovation engine for solving client problems. The new agreement will expand the Lab’s innovation pipeline for another three years with funding for the development of joint products and solutions.

Availability of IBM Cloud Satellite wherever VMware Applications run — IBM and VMware are collaborating to enable IBM Cloud Satellite for VMware. For workloads that need to remain on-premises, IBM Cloud Satellite now supports VMware workloads in any environment where they run, bringing the enhanced security and open innovation of IBM Cloud services to the client’s datacenter. IBM Cloud Satellite brings a secured and unified layer of cloud services for clients, in any environment.

To learn more about how IBM and VMware are enabling clients to modernize within hybrid environments, please visit: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/vmware.

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IBM Launches New Watson Capabilities to Help Businesses Build Trustworthy AI

Leigh Porter — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 18:36:52 +0000

IBM announced new capabilities for IBM Watson designed to help businesses build trustworthy AI. These capabilities further expand Watson tools designed to help businesses govern and explain AI-led decisions, increase insight accuracy, mitigate risks and meet their privacy and compliance requirements.

An IBM-commissioned survey found that trust, transparency and explainability are top-of-mind concerns for businesses, with 84% of AI professionals surveyed agreeing that consumers are more likely to choose services from a company that offers transparency and an ethical framework on how its data and AI models are built, managed and used. However, the barriers to developing trustworthy AI and mitigating risk remain pervasive, with 82% of AI professionals surveyed saying their organization has been negatively impacted by problems, like bias, with data or AI models^[1].

To help businesses overcome these challenges, IBM is continually bringing new capabilities to its Watson products that are designed to build trust throughout key stages of the AI lifecycle and to help businesses achieve greater confidence in AI-powered outcomes. The new capabilities announced today include:

New data privacy management capabilities: IBM OpenPages with Watson now includes a new Data Privacy Management module designed to help businesses meet evolving data privacy challenges. By integrating with Watson Knowledge Catalog, IBM OpenPages can now provide businesses with a holistic, near real-time view of how private data is being used throughout the organization, from applications to AI models. As new privacy regulations are enacted around the world, businesses need to be able to account for how they use personal data. This new capability is designed to help automate the reporting of personally identifiable information (PII) in order to improve accuracy and reduce audit times.
Enhanced explainability for planning forecasts: IBM Planning Analytics with Watson will include a new statistical details page designed to provide more transparent and easy-to-understand facts about how a forecasting prediction was generated. As more businesses turn to predictive forecasting capabilities to strengthen their financial, sales and supply chain planning, they require transparency in the models and data used to generate the forecast. This new feature is planned for generally availability in 2021 Q2 to provide users with more granular information as well as increased explainability and accountability in their forecasts.
New Federated Learning capabilities: IBM Watson Studio now includes new federated learning capabilities as a tech preview to help businesses apply machine learning techniques to situations where data cannot or should not be moved due to reasons such as data privacy, secrecy, regulatory compliance, or simply the size of data involved. With IBM Watson Studio, businesses will be able to train AI models on previously siloed data sources.
New Time Series capabilities: IBM Watson Studio now includes Time Series capabilities in beta designed to tackle the challenges of automating, analyzing, and forecasting time series data commonly seen in many industries like finance, manufacturing, and retail. The new capabilities are designed to help businesses develop models that predict future values of a time series based on past data or features. Time Series on IBM Watson Studio is designed to achieve accuracy across a variety of univariate datasets — including data such as phone call data logs, weather data, travel times, retail sales, production volume, to driving increase insight accuracy.

“AI is only as useful as your trust in it. Especially in business and when the stakes are high,” said Daniel Hernandez, General Manager, Data and AI, IBM. “IBM Watson continues to deliver critical new capabilities to help enterprises build trust into every step of the AI lifecycle so business leaders can confidently operationalize AI across the hybrid cloud.”

Leading global brands are using IBM Watson to infuse trust into their workflows. Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Germany’s largest airline, is using IBM Watson Studio to build a trusted data and AI foundation to enhance the customer experience and better empower its employees while achieving operational excellence.

IBM is continually harvesting innovations from IBM Research to give businesses the tools, solutions, practices, and skills to govern AI responsibly, including the recently announced AI Factsheets methodology that will be commercialized into Watson Studio in Cloud Pak for Data throughout 2021. Factsheets further complements existing solutions such as IBM Watson OpenScale, IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog, and IBM Watson Machine Learning to provide customers with end-to-end AI lifecycle management and governance capabilities.

Global research firm Gartner recently positioned IBM as a Leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms^[2]. IBM Planning Analytics with Watson has been recognized as a 2021 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice in the Cloud Financial Planning & Analysis market. IBM OpenPages with Watson is recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Risk Management for the fifth time^[3].

This news builds on IBM’s long-standing commitment to the ethical, responsible stewardship of AI. In addition to applying its Principles of Trust and Transparency across the full scope of global operations, IBM recently joined forces to launch the Global AI Action Alliance focused on guiding the responsible policies, practices, and partnerships needed to ensure global cooperation on the design, development and use of AI.

For more information on today’s announcement, please visit: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2021/04/ibm-watson-trust-data-models-processes

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