COMMON, the World, and the Future!

I have the privilege to get to COMMON almost every year. This year, we’re at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, CA—what a fantastic place to stay!

COMMON is a great event for keeping up with the industry, talking to customers, learning from other vendors, and of course hearing IBM’s pitch on where they’re going with technology.

Reduce Costs and Improve Security

Colin Pariss, IBM VP of Power Systems Servers, spoke at the kickoff meeting and shared some interesting facts. He said:

• There are about 32.6 million servers worldwide.
• About 85% of the processors are idle.
• Over the past ten years, the use of computer processors has grown by a factor of 6, and storage consumption by the Power Systems customer base has increased by a factor of 69.
• During the same time period, the world’s data centers have doubled their electricity consumption.

And, going forward, the two major issues for computer professionals are reducing labor costs and improving security.

Get More Efficient

His message to the thousand plus in attendance was that those who keep their data secure and reduce the costs of running their computer systems will be successful. Upper management is demanding that data center managers and infrastructure groups run things more efficiently.

When I hear “run things more efficiently,” I immediately think of computer automation. It makes your environment more productive and secure. You work smarter and stay ahead of the game, even as more processing power and increased demand for storage are the reality.

I’ve said all along that a Power Systems server running IBM i is really a “mainframe” type of environment. The issues that Colin Pariss is talking about are solved quite nicely with this server. Just comparing power consumption to other servers is a great reason to invest in this platform.