According to IBM, the new data center cuts technology infrastructure costs and complexity for clients while raising quality and speeding services deployment. Big Blue's data center also has green implications because it uses only half the energy of most facilities its size.

Pat Kerin, general manager of IBM North America, said data centers have always been a critical part of IBM's global technology services and will become even more important as the processes, infrastructure and systems that define business today become increasingly connected and intelligent.

"This new facility not only sets new standards for energy efficiency ," Kerin said, "but provides the flexible capacity that allows IBM to deliver services that enable clients to reduce costs, improve productivity, and gain competitive advantage in their markets."

Virtualization and Cloud Computing

With the new data center, IBM is beefing up support for new Internet technologies and services. IBM's stated goal is to meet the business challenges of an environment characterized by an "exponential rise in computational power, a proliferation of connected devices, and an imperative to manage energy costs."

IBM accomplishes this, in part, by using advanced software virtualization technologies that make possible access to information and services from any device with high levels of availability and quality of experience. The facility works aggressively to conserve energy resources by leveraging a smart management approach that links equipment, building systems, and data-center operations.

Support for cloud-computing workloads allows clients to tap into only the resources they need to support their IT operations at any given time. This approach also does away with the need for up to 70 percent of the required hardware resources to perform similar tasks. The data center also hosts recently announced Smart Business cloud-computing offerings. According to IBM, each of these solutions can significantly reduce a client's total cost of ownership by up to 40 percent.

IBM Eats its Own Dog Food

"There's a great cliché in the IT industry about vendors being willing to eat their own dog food. IBM has been very forward in its thinking and its talking about the cloud and, historically, IT vendors have tended to be a bit ahead of the curve of the broader market," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. "While the cloud is certainly taking off among some larger organizations and with some services offered by companies like Amazon, broad adoption of the cloud and cloud-style services is still emerging." (continued...)

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