LOS ANGELES, CA -- 04/30/08 --
IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference
-- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is creating an alliance program for
independent hardware and software vendors to support industry standards for
new enterprise data centers, which are dramatically more energy efficient,
virtualized, and resilient.
The new alliance with top IT companies around the world will enable clients
to evolve to new enterprise data centers while offering the widest possible
choice of open technologies.
The importance of interoperability and open standards for new enterprise
data centers -- including those for energy management, virtualization,
networking, security, and service management, among others -- is a focal
point of this program.
For example, vendors that support energy efficiency standards can enable
end-to-end management and monitoring of power and cooling of hardware in
the data center. Such standards pave the way to product interoperability
for greater data center efficiency by setting caps on energy use, shifting
resources to meet business requirements, or adjusting workloads to avoid
higher billing rates.
The alliance is targeted at independent hardware and software vendors that
specialize in elements crucial to data centers, including networking,
virtualization, facilities management, platforms, operating systems,
storage, and systems management.
The alliance will offer several benefits to vendors that join including:
Increased exposure to clients through a new enterprise data center alliance
portal; access to potential joint go-to-market activities; potential
participation in joint-development projects; the ability to participate in
IBM client events; and exposure to capabilities and opportunity for early
interoperability development and tests.
The following IT vendors are in support of this program: Brocade, Citrix,
Eaton, Emulex, Juniper Networks, Novell, RedHat, Sun and VMware.
"Brocade is a long term partner with IBM. We believe this new enterprise
data center Alliance Program is a great opportunity to further our Data
Center Fabric strategy to help IBM customers evolve their data centers,"
said Marty Lans, Sr. Director, Data Center Marketing, Brocade. "IBM's
commitment to open standards and interoperability will be beneficial in
supporting high levels of performance and end-to-end interoperability
across the new enterprise data center ecosystem."
"Citrix and IBM have been working together on servers as well as desktop
virtualization initiatives for some time. We look forward to leveraging
IBM's alliance program for the new enterprise data center to help highlight
how our capabilities can be leveraged in support of IBM's vision," said AJ
Jennings, vice president of business development at Citrix. "We also
support IBM's focus on open standards as a foundation for their vision and
as an element of their alliance program."
"IBM's vision for the new enterprise data center leverages best practices
and technologies to deliver more computing power while reducing costs and
maintaining availability," said Patrick Giangrosso, Eaton, director, global
accounts. "Eaton is thrilled to collaborate with IBM in developing and
delivering solutions that advance IBM's energy efficiency initiative."
"We have teamed with IBM for years to deliver data center solutions and
Emulex's participation in the new IBM alliance program reinforces our
commitment to delivering enterprise-class data center solutions," said Mike
Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Emulex Corp. "With
the largest installed base of Fibre Channel HBAs within IBM SANs worldwide,
Emulex continues to deliver a broad range of connectivity solutions for IBM
systems, including IBM System x and BladeCenter. We share IBM's vision for
the next-generation data center and are committed to helping end users
support the explosive growth of data, manage the increased deployments of
server virtualization and reduce overall operational costs."
"As innovative businesses embrace the holistic, integrated approach of the
new enterprise data center, a critical element for success will be an
underlying high-performance network infrastructure that provides fast,
reliable and secure access to applications and services at scale," said
Craig Strachman, senior director enterprise alliances, Juniper Networks,
Inc. "As the leader in high-performance networking and an active alliance
program member, Juniper together with IBM will offer clients greater choice
and control in quickly meeting evolving business requirements, while
reducing costs."
"Novell is pleased to be part of this alliance with IBM and others to help
customers better manage data complexity along with operational, energy and
cost efficiencies, which is precisely the value proposition around SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server and virtualization in the data center," said Carlos
Montero-Luque, vice president of product management for Open Platform
Solutions at Novell. "Novell is committed to green computing,
virtualization, security and data center management, all priorities of the
new program."
"Red Hat, the leading open source enterprise Linux and virtualization
provider, is an enthusiastic supporter of IBM's new enterprise data center
initiative," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat's Platform
Business Unit. "Our Linux Automation architecture, including integrated
virtualization, extends the open source platform to allow IT to deliver new
levels of efficiency, service delivery and cost benefits. This is very
complementary to IBM's new enterprise data center initiative, including its
emphasis of openness and standards."
"Sun is pleased to be a member of IBM's ecosystem of partners and its new
enterprise data center Alliance Program," said Jim McHugh, Vice President
of Solaris Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "With IBM's System x and
BladeCenter products running the open source Solaris 10 Operating System
from Sun, customers can benefit from open, standards-based solutions that
help improve data center efficiencies. This is yet another example of Sun
and IBM's commitment to delivering open systems with a focus on
performance, scalability, reliability and security in demanding computer
environments."
"VMware and IBM are helping customers make their datacenters and desktops
more cost-effective, energy-efficient and disaster-tolerant," said Dr.
Stephen Herrod, Chief Technology Officer at VMware. "Like IBM, VMware is
committed to broad interoperability and support for open standards, and
VMware virtualization is unmatched in its support for hardware and
operating systems. Building on our longstanding partnership, VMware looks
forward to supporting IBM's alliance program with proven best practices in
virtualization implemented among our 100,000+ customers."
For additional information please visit www.ibm.com/datacenter.
Contact:
Ron Favali
IBM
favali@us.ibm.com
727-489-7202
