Pro IT Zone

IBM Corp plans to unveil a new type of computer for big data hubs operated by Web 2.0 companies.

IBM’s iDataPlex line is due for sale next month and is meant for companies that buy vertical racks with dozens of servers based on Intel microprocessors.

The line is aimed at fewer than 1,000 customers worldwide.

Early testers of the unit include Yahoo Inc and Tencent QQ, a Chinese company. IBM has deployed about 300 units for testing, and the vice president for its enterprise systems group, Jim Gargan, told that he expected large sales.

IBM has announced the launch of a new supercomputer for a revolutionary chilled water system, which can reduce by more than 80% the number of air-conditioning units needed in a typical server configuration. The company also announced the fastest UNIX server on the market called p595.

Both systems are based on the processor Power 6 and involve a use of IBM technology and reduce the costs of operation of data centers, while improving system performance so that customers can migrate to a new generation of centers data.

The new p575 supercomputer incorporates a unique system in which some copper plates chilled water, which are located above each microprocessor constantly absorb heat. It is the first IBM system of water-cooled since 1995 and represents a revolution in the environmental side.

This system makes it possible to reduce power consumption typical of a data centre by 40% and requires 80% less air-conditioning units. The IBM researchers estimate that water can be 4,000 times more effective than air to cool computer systems.

The new UNIX server Power 595 is designed to address the major concerns of the corporations: energy, physical space and system management. The performance of an IBM’s Power machine of 64 cores is twice than an HP Itanium Superdome configured in a similar manner and at the same price.

The new server, incorporates 64 cores Power 6 and has a bandwidth of 1.3 terabytes per second, which would transfer in a second the amount of information printed on paper that would result in 50,000 trees.

With up to 254 virtual partitions and 4 TB of memory, the Power 595 integrates PowerVM virtualization technology for large-scale consolidation. More than 90% of enterprise servers Power Systems currently used PowerVM to save energy and more effectively manage IT costs.

I like open source software… to tell the truth… I love it! Specially because you can get high quality software free of charge and it is supported by a community of developers.

IBM had just recently released their new Beta for Lotus Symphony, a complete office suite based on the Open Office technology that supports the ODF standard.

The ODF or Open Document Format is a file format for electronic office documents like spreadsheets, charts and word processing documents.

A basic Open Document consists of an XML document that uses <office:document> as the root element. The Open Document benefits from the separation of concerns by separating the content, styles, metadata and application settings into four separate XML files.

This cool office suite available for Windows and Linux can also be found with Lotus Notes Client 8. Since IBM will not continue supporting nor developing Lotus SmartSuite, here is a better way to create and edit the documents you need with open standards that will make them compatible with other office suites that work with the ODF standard.

With this office suite you will be able to create spreadsheets, word documents and presentations, the user interface is very friendly and intuitive to use. On IBM Symphony’s official webpageyou will also find plug-ins and templates that can be downloaded for free to enhance your experience. On thing that I also like about this suite is that is available to download if different languages.

Another interesting point is that IBM provides guides and tools to help you to get used to this environment fast and easy, so now you don’t have excuses to try it and make the change.

The best of all is that is free… I have found that the product is very stable even for being a Beta version. In my personal opinion I think that it is ready to be launched officially right now.

And what about developers? Well on the same IBM Symphony homepage you can download the developer toolkit to create and integrate Lotus Symphony Documents with other data such as IBM Notes applications, Websphere Translation Server an other.

If you will like to download and test this office suite just click here, you have nothing to lose.