As an enterprise hardware, software and services provider, IBM is naturally keen on giving advice to its clients on how to improve the efficiency of their data centre operations. But on Sept. 17, Jeanette Horan, vice-president and CIO at IBM, offered a glimpse into how her company has worked on its own big in-house transformation.
First, there was the sheer volume of data. According to Horan, IBM was able to compress enough data and eliminate enough redundancies to allow for "25-40 per cent data growth every year at no extra cost," Horan wrote.
Meanwhile, it cut 6,500 servers from its data centres, freeing up an enormous amount of floor space and saving tens of thousands of megawatts of power.
Finally, it developed what IBM claims as the world's largest private cloud for analytics, known as Blue Insights, which can sift through around 1 petabyte of data. "It can perform a variety analytics in hours or minutes instead of what would take
weeks or month," Horan added.
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