International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) demonstrates its objective to strengthen its position in the Big Data market. The company announced its plan to invest $1 billion in Flash technology, a strategic move to address the increasing challenges confronting the Big Data market.
According to the company, Flash technology is more reliable, durable, and more energy efficient than spinning hard drives. Flash is a highly efficient re-writable memory, and it has the ability to accelerate the response time of information gathering in servers and storage systems from milliseconds to microseconds because it has no moving parts.
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) noted that Flash is increasingly becoming a key requirement to enable Smarter Enterprise because of the growing data volumes, demand for faster analytic insights, and rising data center energy costs.
Ambuj Goyal, General Manager of Systems Storage, IBM Systems & Technology Group said, “The economics and performance of Flash are at a point where the technology can have a revolutionary impact on enterprises, especially for transaction-intensive applications. The confluence of Big Data, social, mobile and cloud technologies is creating an environment in the enterprise that demands faster, more efficient, access to business insights, and Flash can provide that access quickly.”
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM)’s research and development in Flash technology will focus on creating, designing, and integrating new Flash solutions to expand its portfolio of servers, storage systems, and middleware.
In addition, the company also revealed its plan to open 12 competency centers worldwide to allow its clients to run proof-of-concept scenarios with real-world data to measure their projected performance gains from IBM Flash solutions.
According to the company, its clients will be able to see the performance of IBM Flash solutions first-hand. The company said clients will be able to see how IBM Flash solutions provide real-time decision support for operational information, and to help improve the performance of mission critical workloads such as credit card processing, stock exchange transactions, manufacturing, and order processing systems.
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) aims to open competency centers in China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Singapore, South America, UK, and United States. The company said the center will start operating by the end of the year.
Furthermore, IBM also announced its agreement with Sprint Nextel Corporation (NYSE:S) to install nine Flash Storage systems in its data center. The communications carrier added 150TB Flash storage to boost the efficiency and performance of phone activation application. Sprint official said its move is part of the company’s strategy to transfer its most active data to all-Flash storage system.
According to International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM), Flash systems reduces transaction times for applications such as banking, trading, and telecommunications by 90 percent and 85 percent reduction in batch processing times in applications like enterprise resource planning and business analytics.
Flash systems reduce energy consumption in data center consolidation and cloud deployment by 80 percent.
