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How to Add AI Insights and Data Resilience to your Mission-critical Operations

By RAUL RAUDRY DIAZ DE LEON posted Tue July 20, 2021 08:00 AM

  

As organizations push through a series of imperatives in the wake of the pandemic, artificial intelligence (AI) continues to address urgent and immediate business priorities.  AI allows to achieve stronger data-driven decisions; access deeper insights to provide improved customer care; and develop trust and confidence while increasing security and significantly reducing costs.

A recent research conducted by the "IBM Institute of Business Value”1 indicates that COVID-19 has accelerated AI’s shift from experimental to widely adopted as a key lever of sustainable competitive advantage and profitability, this study revealed the following results:  

  • 84% of leading executives expect a steady or increased level of organizational initiatives focused on AI.
  • More than 85% of advanced adopters are reducing operating costs with AI. 47% have realized cost improvement in process efficiency, 41% in supply chain and production, and 39% in headcount efficiency improvements.
  • Organizations that adopt AI outperform peers 2x financially, compared to those who haven’t.

These results highlight the importance of AI adoption; and equally important are those transactional processes that support daily core business operations. Based on the report, leading organizations are those that have the ability to use data to build faster, more efficient operations and make smarter business decisions with privacy and security.

In order to help customers to face the challenges posed by the pandemic, IBM is announcing the next generation of Storage for IBM Z solutions driving AI performance and resilience to transform data into business opportunities.  

The new IBM DS8980F Analytics Class Storage System (ordering systems to be enabled on July 27, 2021) is the perfect storage foundation for consolidating transactional, cloud native, and AI for structured data workloads under a single all flash mission-critical solution, delivering the following benefits to customers as compared to the previous generation: 2

  • Up to 25% reduction in response time for mainframe and 16% reduction in response time for Open Systems to process transactions faster, while expanding workloads to AI,  Analytics and Business Intelligence. 
  • 2.15x more system cache to improve the potential for cache hit rate and delivering faster background operations.
  • 10x availability improvement to maximize systems uptime with an average of only 3 seconds downtime in a year. From six (99.9999) to seven nines (99.99999) of availability.
  • 2x greater bandwidth capacity for the establish Metro Mirror pair function with 32 Gb/s fibre channel host adapters.
  • 19% less weight and 5% less energy consumption improving environmentals while obtaining savings in maintenance and operating costs.

In addition, for the entire family of IBM DS8900F systems, including DS8910F, DS8950F and the new DS8980F; IBM is announcing improvements in Safeguarded Copy to greatly reduce the recovery time from a remote location to the production environment.


For data protection, long-term retention, and disaster recovery; IBM is announcing the new IBM TS7770 All Flash virtual tape library (ordering systems to be enabled on August 24, 2021),  which delivers faster data protection with less infrastructure, plus to the following benefits:

  • Better performance with only 1 flash drawer than previous 10 SAS HDDs drawers.3
  • Flexibility to start your all flash infrastructure with as little as 20TB flash usable capacity and expand to 120 TB with Capacity on Demand.
  • Fully IBM TS7700 Advanced Object Store for DS8000 to ensure data is available from anywhere at any time.
  • 2x faster grid replication technology than the conventional S3 protocol.
  • Aiding with the SEC Rule 17a-4 for electronic records retention compliance requirements.

 



Finally, to improve storage flexibility and data economics, IBM is announcing an end-to-end solution, result of the integration of IBM DS8910F and TS7770 in a single 19-inch industry-standard rack, delivering the following benefits to customers:

  • Floorspace reduction which is especially important for smaller customers in colocation data-centers as they explicitly pay for each tile of floorspace that they are using.
  • Lower cost through sharing of infrastructure components.
  • Use of TS7770 as a virtual tape library directly connected to IBM Z through FICON, or as an Object Store to transparently move data from the IBM DS8910F for data protection and disaster recovery.

By integrating the IBM DS8910F and TS7770 in a single frame, small and medium size organizations now can get enterprise storage capabilities, while reducing complexity and costs.

Once more, with this announcement, IBM shows the commitment to continue offering the best technological solutions in the industry to help customers reach the market faster and adapt quickly to the ever-changing situations imposed by the times that we are all living.

To learn more, visit the IBM DS8900F and IBM TS7700 web pages.


by Raúl Raudry and Lizbeth Ramirez
@RAUL RAUDRY DIAZ DE LEON @LIZBETH RAMIREZ LETECHIPIA


1 IBM Institute for Business Value, The business value of AI, 2020 https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/ZENVBND4
2 Values obtained comparing the specifications of IBM DS8980F and IBM DS8888F Model 982
3 Performance improvement observed on various workloads in comparison of TS7770 VED 5.2 system with 1 SSD flash drawer with previous TS7770 VED 5.1 system with 10 HDD drawers with 12EH8/8x16Gb/2x10Gb configuration. Performance tested for standalone, two-way and four-way configuration with 5.35:1 ZSTD compression.

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