KUALA LUMPUR, 28 SEPTEMBER 2009 – A new agreement with three networking companies will offer more customer choice, according to technology giant IBM Malaysia.
IBM Malaysia country manager, system and technology group, Azlina Arif, said the agreement with three networking firms—Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper—was an important element in IBM’s Data Centre Networking (DCN) initiative.
Arif said businesses will be able to more effectively route the enormous amount of data and transactions being driven by an increasingly instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent world.
In addition, she said IBM is announcing reseller and original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreements for switches and routers that help move and manage data across networks. “Demands on networks are increasing with the proliferation of the mobile Web and connected sensors expected to lead to 16-fold growth in each individual’s ‘information footprint’ by 2020, according to IBM.”
Growing footprints
Arif cited an IBM study that expected the ‘individual footprint’ of a consumer to grow from an estimated 1 TB [terabyte] to more than 16 TB by 2020. “As the world becomes more interconnected through sensors, that data will not only be stored, but moved across networks and clouds more increasingly, making the network and connectivity key to the success of the future data centre.”
“Our goal is to provide customers with a dynamic, powerful and less costly IT infrastructure that delivers industry-leading virtualisation and optimised management solutions,” said Brocade senior vice president of the products and offerings division, Marc Randall. “Brocade is pleased to be partnering with IBM on their data centre networking initiative. IBM and Brocade now offer a complete end-to-end Fibre Channel, FCoE and ethernet solutions so customers can achieve the performance needed to create a dynamic infrastructure engineered to manage risk, improve service and reduce costs from desktop-to-server.”
“Customers are deploying Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches with FCoE rapidly because the technology is non-disruptive, improves energy efficiency in the data centre, and significantly reduces costs,” said Cisco vice president of marketing for the server access virtualisation business group, Soni Jiandani. “This extended agreement with IBM gives Cisco the ability to support more of our customers’ goals to deploy a unified fabric with converged networks.”
“This agreement between Juniper and IBM represents a continued deepening of our relationship,” said Juniper Networks executive vice president and general manager, platforms business group, Hitesh Sheth. “Juniper's focus on delivering high-performance networking solutions fits IBM's dynamic infrastructure approach to helping customers reduce costs, improve services and manage risk.”
“These announcements of new and or expanded agreements with Brocade, Cisco and Juniper are part of IBM’s commitment to offer customer choice built on open standards,” said IBM’s Arif. “By working with Brocade, Cisco and Juniper to deliver networking products, we can help our customers optimise their networks to take advantage of emerging technologies in an increasingly instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent world.”
