Information Technology Whitepapers

Scale-out storage technologies have rapidly gained popularity over the past several years, successfully crossing the chasm from niche technology to mainstream enterprise solution. As this shift occurs, an increasing number of enterprises are seeking to understand the advantages of the newer technology when it comes to the storage of exploding amounts of unstructured data.

Today’s enterprise faces a myriad of choices when selecting storage technologies. For a large and quickly growing segment of storage applications - those characterized by the need to reliably store large volumes of unstructured data - an increasing number of enterprises are turning to "scale-out" storage technologies.

Over the past ten years, enterprises have seen enormous gains in scalability, flexibility, and affordability as they migrated from proprietary, monolithic server architectures to architectures that are virtualized, open source, standardized, and commoditized.

Unfortunately, storage has not kept pace with computing. The proprietary, monolithic, shared- all, and scale-up solutions that dominate the storage industry today do not deliver the scalabil- ity, flexibility, and economics that modern datacenter and cloud computing environments need in a hyper-growth, virtualized, and increasingly cloud-based world. Red Hat Storage was created to address this gap.

Is your company struggling to keep up with unprecedented data growth? If so, you’re not alone. With the amount of data managed by enterprise datacenters expected to explode by a factor of 50 over the coming decade, CIOs now rank data growth as their top concern, and making sense of all that data as their top priority. Data appears to have officially taken center stage within the enterprise, and for good reason.

The Aberdeen Group surveyed 106 enterprises spanning various sectors to see how they are dealing with very high growth storage. In this report we look at each component of Hybrid Cloud Storage. As users of this new technology, they will be able to choose where to locate their data, on-premise with Scale-out NAS or in the Public Cloud.

IBM® SmartCloud Social Collaboration for Government offers a rich suite of cloud-based social collaboration services designed to improve efficiency and productivity while decreasing costs. Hosted in a dedicated cloud environment, the suite features industry leading web-based email and instant messaging, collaboration, social networking and support for mobile devices. Such tools can help you facilitate a more productive workforce that makes better decisions faster.

In line with government policies and initiatives to lower cost while improving citizen services, IBM SmartCloud Social Collaboration for Government can enable you to reap the productivity benefits of collaboration capabilities without long-term commitment at reduced cost.

IBM SmartCloud Solutions enables organizations to execute business processes, analytics and applications as a service, and then realize cloud benefits by accelerating the time to market of these solutions and the transformation they bring. These solutions enable clients to reduce risk and capital investment, as well as the burden on IT resources, with instant and ongoing scalability to help them stay one step ahead of the market.

The growing mobile workforce expects to connect to the corporate network anytime, anywhere and using any mobile device. As the number of mobile employees continues to grow, enterprises of all sizes need smart mobility cloud solutions that reduce costs, increase control and mitigate security risks. Combining the power of cloud computing with the freedom and functionality of mobile devices can give enterprises access to a wide range of key benefits, including increased reliability, real-time updates and access to applications that embrace and cultivate the spirit of collaboration and community—both internally and externally—while delivering outstanding return for the time invested.

SmartCloud Engage is an integrated suite of collaboration tools that combine your business social network with web conferencing and collaboration capabilities, like file storing and sharing, instant messaging and activity management. SmartCloud Engage provides essential collaboration services, leveraging IBM’s unique position as a world-renowned security leader and trusted partner.

Security is a competitive differentiator for SmartCloud Engage. SmartCloud Engage business-ready security is based on a deep understanding of security and privacy best practices in IBM. Our security controls provide privacy and controlled authorization to sensitive information while enabling business operations. Engage protects our customers’ information through governance, tools, technology, techniques, and personnel.

In Forrester's 38-criteria evaluation of the cloud strategies of online collaboration software vendors, we identified eight significant collaboration services providers — Box, Cisco Systems, Citrix Online, Google, IBM, Microsoft, salesforce.com, and Yammer — in the category and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report details our findings about how well each vendor fulfills our criteria for constructing an online collaboration service and where they stand in relation to each other. Given the relative immaturity of this market and the nature of client questions about it, Forrester chose to evaluate the overall strategies of these providers across criteria like global footprint, service-level agreements, mobile support, enterprise readiness, and more. This report and associated Excel model highlight the key criteria CIOs and their staffs should evaluate when looking at prospective providers of online collaboration services.

Deepen your customer relationships. Drive operational effectiveness. Optimize your workforce. Read this solution brief to see how using IBM SmartCloud for Social Business services to become a social business can help your organization simplify, speed up and enhance interactions in practically all areas of the business.