IBM Targets Hybrid Sweet Spot with New Cloud-Ready Offers

Focusing on hybrid cloud, IBM on Monday launched several products that consist of a combination of Power, z Systems, and storage – to enable the flexibility and agility that businesses are demanding.

“All the products that we announced share a hybrid-cloud flavor and are all about the flexibility of infrastructure,” said Mike Perera, vice president, IBM zSystems software. The announcements were at IBM Edge 2016, being held this week in Las Vegas.

Taking a close look at the three pillars of products:

More news around zSystems Monday from IBM includes enabling clients to monitor hybrid applications.{ad}

“Today, if you have an application and some of it runs on Bluemix and some runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, you don’t really have an end-to-end view of the health of that application. You’ve got a Bluemix view and you’ve got a z view but if something goes wrong – or ideally – before something goes wrong, you need to be able to look end to end for slowdowns or bottlenecks, or where’s the issue that’s going to impact the broader application — there’s no way to do that,” Perera explained.

That’s about to change with …

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… Omegamon for Application Performance Management, which plugs into IBM’s Omegamon Performance Management Suite.

The last zSystems-related news is software-as-a-service (SaaS) support for z and operational analytics, called zSystems Operational Insights. “In this case, we’re using the IBM cloud and Bluemix to create individual insights that not only report on the health of the system but also provide “next steps” addressing needs around clients skills or accelerated best practices. as well as community aspects for benchmarking themselves against other clients in the community,” Perera noted.

Ultimately, there’ll be a marketplace where clients get what they need without having to install, configure and learn new tools.{ad}

Finally, IBM Operational Analytics for zSystems, for anomaly detection, now supports hybrid cloud, giving the user the option of selecting where they want to analyze the data, i.e., on z, Linux on z, Power, or in the cloud, for example. “Customers take the data and export it into [whichever] analytics operational application they’re using, i.e. Splunk, in order to streamline it on an enterprise basis,” said Perera.

On the storage front, IBM on Monday announced IBM Copy Data Management and Protect, which lets users back up data to the cloud, i.e. SoftLayer, Amazon, etc.