Heavy Workloads Need Smart Datacentres

Vishwanath Ramaswamy, Country Manager, Power Systems, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/South Asia talks in detail about the ideal infrastructure for managing heavy workloads. Biztech2.com gets more from him on this in a quick one-on-one.

What kind of infrastructure do enterprises need to deal with heavy workloads?

Workloads can be classified into computation and data. Enterprises are dealing with unstructured data leading to a situation where information is surmounting, making things more complex by the day. Workload relating to data is moving towards real-time transactions and thus, technology needs to move in that direction as well.

An ideal infrastructure required to deal with heavy workloads would be one that would require the least manageability, manpower and energy. Critical decisions have to be taken for putting the right hardware in place for the ideal infrastructure. Enterprises must have datacentres that are smart. Heavy workloads are time-driven and the infrastructure should be able to manage all these in real-time, be super efficient and aid optimisation.

What datacentre designs should CIOs look at, keeping in mind the cost of power and cooling?

The first question that CIOs must answer is that does the datacentre work for all workloads? They should look at every gear to save energy. IT consumes the most amount of energy and servers cannot be switched off. Datacentre design can be got right by having the right systems, which can intelligently save. With business changes, datacentres need to be interconnected and intelligent, both internally and externally. The smarter the datacentre, the more responsive it will be.

What is the server virtualisation landscape in India like?

Enterprises can do a lot with fewer resources and virtualisation is the single most important technology for most IT departments. Virtualistion is high on the customer agenda. As of now a lot of customers are consolidating a lot of applications. The SME sector is virtualising on the compute side, while large enterprises are focusing on both compute as well as storage. Large enterprises have matured with virtualisation on the networking side.

Can you tell us about Power 7 systems?

IBM Power 7 systems are a landmark feat in infrastructure. They are a result of 25 years of innovation of AIX. These systems are 3-4 times more energy efficient per core and have in-built intelligence. We are driving more innovation on these systems.