5 retail supply chain insights from NRF 2021

Did you miss “Chapter One” of the National Retail Federation’s (NRF’s) Big Show event in January? Wondering what valuable supply chain insights you might’ve missed from IBM retail clients and experts? We’ve got you covered with the top five supply chain insights from this year’s virtual event.

1. Supply chain resilience starts with end-to-end visibility

Moving into 2021, supply chain resilience is a top priority for most retailers. To optimize operations in good times and maintain business continuity during disruption, supply chain leaders need real-time, actionable insights. But supplier complexity, siloed systems, batch ERP data, and error-prone, manual processes can make it difficult to even see current and complete data – let alone analyze it in time to make better supply chain decisions.

Golden State Foods (GSF) is tackling visibility and transparency challenges using a combination of AI, IoT and blockchain to preserve the quality of products the company delivers to quick-serve restaurants and stores worldwide. In our first Big Ideas speaking session, Bob Wolpert, Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer for GSF, shared how they’re gaining visibility into data from IoT sensors in refrigeration trucks and applying AI to reveal trends and patterns. This allows them to monitor compliance with temperature ranges, address points of weakness, and ensure higher product quality with less waste. Blockchain drives additional value by enabling GSF to track product movement in real-time with trust and transparency, so they can adjust replenishment cycles, shift goods to different locations, and alter production based on demand patterns. “If you have the data and you can see it to act quickly, that’s a game changer for your supply chain,” said Bob.

2. Omnichannel fulfillment keeps customer needs front and center

Retailers never could have imagined the turbulence of last year when their doors were forced to close, at least temporarily. Flexible fulfillment options like curbside pickup were the key to meeting customer needs for essential retailers, like grocers, and keeping inventory moving for others. Even in the face of added complexity, some retailers were able to pivot more quickly and easily because they had the right order management system (OMS) in place.

For example, Sally Beauty serves both consumers and businesses and experienced different demand shifts depending on the customer base. Consumers were moving to DIY hair color and nail treatments, while salons were closing. In another Big Ideas session, Sally Beauty explained how they regrouped and reopened by implementing new omnichannel capabilities in three short weeks. With IBM’s SaaS-based OMS, they were able to scale quickly and manage peak demand, which was essential considering they re-emerged into an environment that was the equivalent of Black Friday times 10. They expanded ship-from-store and same-day delivery capabilities, and soon added buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS). “All of this is with the intent to remove customer friction and thinking customer first. If it doesn’t impact the customer, we’re not going to spend time on it,” said Joe Condomina, CTO, Sally Beauty.

3. When you empower the customer, you empower the industry

Consumers want to make more informed decisions about the food they buy and the brands they support. Research shows 65% of consumers want to know more about how food is produced. Providing this information builds trust and competitive advantage. But what does this mean for supply chain leaders?

The National Chamber of Aquaculture of Ecuador, through its Sustainable Shrimp Partnership (SSP), has realized the answer is education enabled through blockchain. Many consumers don’t know the origin of the shrimp they eat and the practices behind the product. The SSP leads the way in sustainable practices that have personal health and environmental benefits, but they needed to be able to capture and share that information to empower customers and the shrimp industry. In our final Big Ideas session, Jose Antonio Camposano, Executive President, National Chamber of Aquaculture of Ecuador, SSP, explained how by shifting the industry from manual processes and excel spreadsheets to a blockchain-based platform, all parties can track and trace shrimp from the hatchery, to the farm, to processing facilities and export operations. “For the first time, the consumer will be the one with the power to go back to the company and ask them directly for the information they are interested in,” said Jose. Consumers – chefs, nutritionists and home cooks – can scan a QR code to get information like antibiotic usage and farming impact on ecosystems to help make better decisions. And the industry gains long term sustainability, differentiation and growth opportunities.

4. Building trust and transparency is a team sport

Supply chains are no longer linear, but more dynamic in many industries. They are networks of networks with parties sometimes changing roles to play different positions on the team. During the pandemic, some channel distributors holding a lot of inventory became suppliers, and retail stores forced to close their doors became distribution centers. With shifting relationships and rising customer expectations, trust has come to the forefront – especially with trust in vaccines top of mind right now – but trust in food and fashion has been a top concern for years.

In an interactive session co-led by Jason Kelley, General Manager, IBM Blockchain Services, and Karim Giscombe, president and founder, Plant AG, participants discussed how trust is established with data. In non-linear supply chains, that data must be shared in a distributed model. Adding blockchain technology to a multi-enterprise business network allows for this, providing permissioned access to trusted data across the supply chain. Karim explained how Plant AG is addressing the massive disconnect between food producers and consumers. Working with IBM, Plant AG is using blockchain to create data connectivity and a single source of truth along the food supply chain, from point of origin to point of consumption and all parties in between.

5. Weather insights help mitigate the impact of climate change on the supply chain

Finally, in an interactive session with John Bosse, Offering Manager for AI Applications, IBM, participants discussed how to identify and manage the effect of climate challenges within supply chains and retail operations. Today, climate change is disrupting the operating model of all businesses in myriad ways, and brands must understand how to turn negatives into positives. Consumers are willing to align their shopping habits to support their values of sustainability and healthy lifestyles, making it more important than ever for retailers to consider their environmental impact. In addition to doing right by the planet, companies that plan with climate change in mind can secure an 18% higher return on investment than companies that do not. With weather insights, companies are increasing food production on existing farmland to avoid deforestation and responsibly feed a growing population, enabling sustainable oil palm production, and increasing crop yields and quality while reducing water use. Additionally, retailers are reducing greenhouse gas emissions around their supply chain logistics and better predicting the impact weather has on consumer demands.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM AI finds new peptides – paving the way to better drug design

Antibiotic resistance is no joke. It’s a huge threat to human health — even more so during the raging pandemic. We need new antibiotics, and we need them fast.

In the US alone, nearly three million people get infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria or fungi every year. But very few new antibiotics are being developed to replace those that no longer work. That’s because drug design is an extremely difficult and lengthy process — there are more possible chemical combinations of a new molecule than there are atoms in the Universe.

We want to help.

Paving the way to the era of Accelerated Discovery, our IBM Research team has developed an AI system that can help speed up the design of molecules for novel antibiotics. And it works — in “Accelerating Antimicrobial Discovery with Controllable Deep Generative Models and Molecular Dynamics,” published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, we outline how we used it to create two new non-toxic antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) with strong broad-spectrum potency. Peptides are small molecules — they are short strings of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Our approach outperforms other leading de novo AMP design methods by nearly 10 percent.

Beyond antibiotics, this generative AI system could potentially accelerate the design process of the best possible molecules for new drugs and materials — helping scientists to use AI to discover and design better candidates for more effective drugs and therapies for diseases, materials to absorb and capture carbon to help fight climate change, materials for more intelligent energy production and storage, and much more. To fight these challenges, we need to accelerate the rate of discovery of new and functional molecules — at scale.

Where is that molecule?

That’s far from easy. Zeroing in on the correct molecular configuration that would lead to a new material with desired properties among the astronomical number of possible molecules is like looking for a needle in a haystack. For peptides, one would typically have to experimentally screen more than a hundred molecules to find one with the right properties.

So we’ve turned to AI for help.

First, we used an AI generative model dubbed a deep generative autoencoder to learn about the vast space of known peptide molecules. The model captured meaningful information such as molecular similarity and function about diverse peptide sequences, enabling us to explore beyond known antimicrobial templates.

We then applied Controlled Latent attribute Space Sampling (CLaSS) — a recently developed computational method for generating novel peptide molecules with custom properties. It works by sampling from the informative latent space of peptides and relies on a rejection sampling scheme guided by the molecular property the classifier trained on during the latent representation. Since CLaSS performs attribute-conditioned sampling in the compressed latent space, it is a computationally efficient and scalable approach that can be easily repurposed.

We then used deep learning classifiers to screen the AI-generated candidate antimicrobial molecules for additional key attributes, such as toxicity and broad-spectrum activity. We performed additional screening with the help of high-throughput, coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. These simulations look for presence of novel physicochemical features indicative of stable and peptide-membrane binding, such as low-contact variance between peptide and membrane.

Within 48 days, our AI-boosted molecular design approach to Accelerated Discovery enabled us to identify, synthesize, and experimentally test 20 AI-generated novel candidate antimicrobial peptides. Two of them turned out to be highly potent against diverse Gram-positive and Gram-negative pathogens (including multidrug-resistant K. pneumoniae) and very unlikely to trigger drug resistance in E. coli.

We also didn’t find any cross-resistance for either of the AMPs when tested using a polymyxin-resistant strain. Live-cell confocal imaging showed the formation of membrane pores as the underlying mechanism of bactericidal mode of action of these peptides. Both antimicrobials have low toxicity — we tested them in vitro and also in mice, providing important information about the safety, toxicity and efficacy of these antimicrobial candidates in a complex animal model.

Our proposed approach could potentially lead to faster and more efficient discovery of potent and selective broad-spectrum antimicrobials to keep antibiotic-resistant bacteria at bay — for good. And we hope that our AI could also be used to help address the world’s other most difficult discovery challenges, such as designing new therapeutics, environmentally friendly and sustainable photoresists, new catalysts for more efficient carbon capture, and so much more.

Source: ibm.com

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Expanding our DevOps portfolio with GitLab Ultimate for IBM Cloud Paks

In the era of hybrid cloud, our clients are facing constant pressure to adapt to and adopt new models for application development and IT consumption in order to unlock the speed and agility of hybrid cloud. With even tighter budgets and more pressure to transform given the impact of our new normal, there is no better time to reimagine the way mission-critical workloads run on IBM Z.

Many clients such as State Farm, RBC and BNP Paribas have benefited by adopting DevOps on IBM Z which allows them to unlock new potential for increased speed and agility, directly influencing their digital transformation initiatives. Clients are able to leverage their investments in and the strength of their existing IT infrastructure, clouds and applications in a seamless way with people, platforms and experience they already have on hand.

Over the past year, IBM Z has taken significant strides to bring new DevOps tools to the platform, with seamless hybrid application development including IBM Wazi Developer for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces and Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, as well as a series of new hybrid cloud container offerings for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Today IBM announced GitLab Ultimate for IBM Cloud Paks, expanding our DevOps offerings across the business allowing clients to get a comprehensive solution with a DevOps toolchain for modernization.  This is another significant milestone for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE clients, bringing even more choice with cloud-native development on IBM Z.

This is a significant step forward for IBM Z clients and is designed to unlock their software innovations by reducing the cycle time between having an idea, seeing it in production and monitoring it to ensure optimal performance. It provides an innovative, open and hybrid solution for DevOps.

With GitLab Ultimate for IBM Cloud Paks, developers will be able to compose their DevOps solution using GitLab, write in any language they want and deploy it in any hybrid cloud environment they choose. Developers will also be able to take advantage of GitOps and GitLab’s orchestration automation technology, which can be used in conjunction with GitLab pipelines.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM’s innovation: Topping the US patent list for 28 years running

Granted to my IBM colleagues and myself in 2005, it was for a topcoat waterproof material for a photoresist — a light-sensitive substance used to make circuit patterns for semiconductor chips. It was a proud moment for me — especially as I knew that this patent contained novel capabilities that were critical for a brand-new technology called immersion lithography. This technology soon became the basis for how all advanced chips are manufactured, even to this date.

I also knew it had contributed to IBM’s patent leadership that year. Just like during the 13 years before and 15 years after, IBM has been getting more patents granted than any other company in the US.

For me, this patent leadership symbolizes much more than just the mere fact of being at the top. A patent is evidence of an invention, protecting it through legal documentation, and importantly, published for all to read. The number of patents we produce each year — and in 2020, it was more than 9,130 US patents — demonstrates our continuous, never-ending commitment to research and innovation. We are actively planting the research seeds of the bleeding edge technological world of tomorrow. Our most recent patents span artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud, cyber-security and quantum computing. It doesn’t get more future-looking than this.

The US patent system goes back to the very dawn of our nation. It is detailed in the Constitution, enabling the Congress to grant inventors the exclusive right to their discoveries for a specific period of time. It is an assurance designed to motivate inventors to keep innovating.

One might argue against having patents that don’t get immediately turned into commercial products. But I disagree. Inventing something new is similar to putting forward a well thought out theory that may, one day, be verified experimentally. Perhaps not straight away, but it’s still vital to have theories to enhance our overall understanding of a field and to keep progress going. Having future-looking patents is just as important as those aimed at products of today, and a broad portfolio of scientific advances always ends up contributing to waves of innovation.

Patents drive innovation and a nation’s economic performance. Over the years, they have given us breakthrough technologies such as the laser, self-driving cars, graphene and solar panels. We at IBM have developed and patented such widely used products as the automated teller machine (ATM), speech recognition technology, B2B e-commerce software with consumer-like shopping features for processing business orders, the hard disk drive, DRAM (the ubiquitous memory that powers our phones and computers), and even the famous floppy disk that’s now history, to name just a few.

Tackling the world’s problems

A patent’s assurance of the protection of inventions is a key reason why companies invest billions of dollars in research and development. This results in scientists and engineers in different companies trying to find the best, original solutions to the world’s problems, paving the way for new and better products. And we haven’t run out of global problems to solve, far from it. Innovation is what helps us deal with pandemics, tackle global warming, address energy and food shortages, and much more.

Last year, just in the field of AI, our researchers received more than 2,300 patents. To take two examples among many: a novel way to search multilingual documents using natural language processing, and an ultra-efficient system for transferring image data taken by an on-vehicle camera. These both speak to the innovation and original thinking from our inventors in AI.

In cloud, we received about 3,000 patents, many focusing on data processing categorizations that can help bring services to the edge. In cyber-security, I’d like to single out patents in fully homomorphic encryption — an area of cryptography where computations are made on data that stays encrypted at all times. With so many data leaks jeopardizing the privacy of our medical, genomic, financial and other sensitive records, secure encryption is more important than ever.

Finally, there is quantum computing. This next-generation technology is getting ever better. I am convinced that in the near future, products relying on quantum computation will be an integral part of our daily lives. By inventing and patenting those products today, we are ensuring our quantum future.

One of our quantum computing patents deals with running molecular simulations on a quantum computer. Performing such simulations faster and across a much wider molecular space than a classical computer can ever do could help us design new molecules for novel drugs or catalysts. Another patent addresses the use of quantum computing in finance, to run risk analysis more precisely and efficiently than ever before.

That’s far from all. Quantum computers of today are ‘noisy’ — meaning that the quantum bits, or qubits, they rely on get easily affected by any external disturbances. Many of our patents detail ways to make qubits much more stable and even suggest approaches to correct the remaining errors in future stable qubits, offering a path to realize quantum error-correction and unleash the power of quantum computers to solve the currently unsolvable.

I’ll end with a reflection. A vibrant culture of innovation combines patenting, publishing, contributing to open-source, and active in-market experimentation and discovery. All are needed, fueled by the joy that innovators experience with the spark of novel ideas, and the desire to bring them to life.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM Molecule Generation Experience: Supercharging new materials design with AI and Hybrid Cloud

If you think about it, the chemical sciences have made great strides in the discovery of novel and useful materials over the past several decades. Just in the area of polymers alone, the recent development of thermoplastics or structural polymers has had a huge influence on numerous applications ranging from new paints to clothing fibers and photographic film. These are all examples of how chemical sciences have contributed to indispensable materials for everyday use.  

The discovery of new materials is the driving force in the expansion and improvement of industrial products. From tissue engineering to drug discovery or the discovery of sustainable materials that are kinder to Mother Earth, there are a zillion chemical compounds yet to be discovered. However, the vastness of chemical space, which inhabits all possible design combinations of material structures, exceeds the capability of human experts to explore even a small fraction it all. Just the sound of it is pretty intimidating, especially to chemists.   

But what if artificial intelligence (AI) could help crack open the door to the infinite possibilities that chemical space has to offer? This is the question my research team – Toshiyuki Hama, Hsiang Han Hsu, Akihiro Kishimoto – and I at the IBM Research lab in Japan asked ourselves before we embarked on a voyage to find ways to automate the process of designing brand new molecular structures. Today, we are proudly announcing the launch of the IBM Molecule Generation Experience (MolGX) (pronounced “Mol-gee-ex“), an IBM cloud-based, AI-driven molecular inverse-design platform, which automatically designs brand new molecular structures rapidly and diversely. Inverse-design aims to discover tailored materials from the property targets of the product. 

MolGX is part of IBM’s accelerated discovery strategy, which aims to supercharge the scientific methodology using AI, hybrid cloud, automation, and eventually quantum computing. Its goal is to speed up the discovery of new materials by 10 to 100 times. 

Structured data, which incorporate structures and characteristics of molecules, are extracted by IBM Deep Search and complimented by AI-accelerated simulation, and integrated into MolGX to train the generative AI. MolGX supports simplified molecular-input line-entry system, or SMILES, which represents a line drawing of a molecule as a sequence of characters, such as BrCCOC1OCCCC1. Candidate molecules generated by MolGX can be passed to IBM RXN for Chemistry, which predicts chemical reactions or retrosynthesis pathways and IBM RoboRXN, which automates chemical synthesis using robots. 

Taking a new pathway

The development of new materials follows a number of different pathways, depending on both the nature of the problem being pursued and the means of investigation. Breakthroughs in the discovery of new materials span from pure chance, to trial-and-error approaches, to design by analogy to existing systems. While these methodologies have taken us far, the challenges and requirements for new materials are more complex — so too are the demands and issues for which new materials are needed. As we face global problems such as pandemics and climate change, the necessity and urgency to design and develop new medicines and materials at a faster pace and on a molecular scale through to the macroscopic level of a final product is becoming increasingly important.  

Our aim in developing MolGX is to accelerate molecular inverse design through state-of-the-art molecular generative AI-model technology. You may have heard of AI engines that can draw realistic images of landscapes or portraits of people that don’t exist. These are called generative models, and rather than use them to create imaginary things, we’ve adapted this technology to automatically generate molecules from desired chemical properties such as “solubility in water” and “heatability” by performing three simple steps: observing and selecting a dataset, training the AI model to predict chemical characteristics within the given parameters, and designing molecular structures based on the model built.  

In collaboration with IBM Garage team in Tokyo – including, Makoto Kogo, Takumi Hongo, Kumiko Fujieda – we then made it scalable in the IBM Cloud and accessible with an easy-to-understand user interface with general users in mind. Essentially anyone, even those without advanced IT skills, can experience the cutting edge of materials informatics as well as learn the basics of AI.  

We also created a version for chemistry professionals and industries, which includes additional functionalities such as exportation of results, customized modelling and data uploading to explore beyond the built-in dataset. 

MolGX introduces a novel pathway to generating new materials as it reduces the development time and allows for the innovation of new materials that are not bound by fixed ideas. 

Accelerating the design experience

Our novel AI-driven molecular inverse-design platform is ready to be deployed and tested with companies making materials, including at IBM, where we have applied it towards the development of a new photoacid generator, an important material in electronics manufacturing. 

It offers material R&D three main advantages:

Firstly, it features an algorithm-based encoding and structure generation process, as oppose to a data-driven one; so there is no pre-training of large datasets, nor the major training costs that come with this task.

Secondly, the space and structure generation process are fully interpretable for human chemists, and therefore easy to customize chemical insights about molecular structures.

Finally, hierarchical data structures and a clear UI provide a flexible and intuitive workflow.  

The MolGX professional version, which includes additional functionality, is already being deployed as a service at materials manufacturing company NAGASE & CO LTD, running on IBM’s and NAGASE’s cloud. Inverse-design of sugar and dye molecules were carried out more than 10 times faster than the performance of human chemists. In addition, the diversity of molecular structures was expanded while still satisfying chemical rationality. 

Just imagine all the new materials we could discover at this accelerated speed, and all the problem we could solve. One of the ways to realize a sustainable future is to discover new materials that can address global issues. For example, we could create new materials with properties that can rapidly adsorb carbon dioxide or convert sunlight into electricity without losing energy.

The properties of materials are determined by the shape of the molecules that make up the material, but there are almost infinite patterns in the shape of molecules, which is why it takes an enormous amounts of time to develop new materials – time we can’t afford to waste. There is a growing demand for technologies like MolGX that can optimize materials design in a quicker and more cost-efficient manor by utilizing AI and Hybrid Cloud. Our platform is a perfect example of how AI and cutting-edge data processing technologies can put us on the fast track to the discovery of innovative materials that can make a significant impact on the environment and on our society.

Source: ibm.com

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Storage made simple for all

Information technology (IT) is growing more complex every year. In fact, two out of three IT decision-makers surveyed say that their IT environment is more complex now than it was two years ago. Adding to traditional challenges such as greatly increasing data volumes and the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape, new drivers of IT complexity include ongoing digital transformation, a modern and always-on mobile workforce and expanding hybrid cloud architecture.

IT complexity is costly. Operational expenses rise, general data risks increase and maintenance occurs more often. Even vulnerability to cyber threats increases with added complexity. So the question becomes, how can we reduce IT complexity and bring down costs?

Last year IBM introduced the new IBM FlashSystem® family. This is a single platform for all non-mainframe environments designed to simplify your storage infrastructure while delivering extensive enterprise-class storage innovation, including seamless hybrid cloud and container integration. The ongoing challenges, costs and risks imposed by IT complexity underscore the importance of today’s IBM Storage announcements. New IBM offerings, technologies and programs buck the complexity trend. With these new offerings, your storage solutions can potentially become more compact, less costly than the IBM FlashSystem 5100, and yes — much simpler.

The new IBM FlashSystem 5200 offers a perfect example of storage made simple for all.

IBM FlashSystem 5200 is designed to accelerate a wide range of enterprise deployments for bare metal, virtualized, hybrid cloud or containerized configurations. It’s the most compact storage system we’ve ever made. FlashSystem 5200 is designed with enterprise-class capabilities, including end-to-end NVMe support, IBM FlashCore® technology, storage-class memory and an extensive set of data services in our award-winning IBM Spectrum® Virtualize software-defined storage.

“With its new FlashSystem 5200, IBM has made a tremendous leap forward, packing impressive levels of performance and capacity into a 1U package. While capable enough for the data center, the form factor of the 5200 can offer transformational value for smaller organizations and edge locations.”

 – Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst, ESG

This new system is designed to provide the performance, cost efficiency and functionality for almost any workload in a compact unit that is ideal for any deployment. It combines latency of less than 70 microseconds for optimal application performance and as much as 1.7 PB of data in only 1 rack unit with data reduction options for reduced OPEX and CAPEX. It includes IBM HyperSwap® high-availability technology and 3-site replication for enhanced business continuity. Say goodbye to your traditional hybrid storage systems and modernize your infrastructure.

“Our clients want simplicity,” states David Ficacci, Director of Technology at Micro Strategies. “Too many so-called solutions these days are really just collections of new headaches for our clients. IBM FlashSystem 5200 is different. It can consolidate the entire storage environment whether it’s edge or core data center to simplify management. Then it can start small and grow with the business. Nothing extra to order. One solution the size of a pizza box can handle our business needs, including seamless connectivity to hybrid cloud. This is the simplicity and versatility our clients want.”

IBM Storage has focused on more than inventing a new storage platform. Other IBM FlashSystem family members have also seen important enhancements. For example:

◉ New IBM FlashSystem 5015 and IBM FlashSystem 5035 use efficient IBM Distributed RAID 1, designed for improved performance with small configurations. FlashSystem 5035 is 22% faster than its predecessor.

◉ IBM Spectrum Virtualize software in IBM FlashSystem adds GUI support for 3-site and HyperSwap configurations, designed to be easier to deploy in high-availability configurations.

◉ IBM plans to deliver a version of IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud — our hybrid cloud data fabric software — optimized for Microsoft® Azure®. It is being designed to offer functionality for Microsoft Azure that is comparable to what we already offer on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM Cloud® starting with a beta program with an anticipated release date of 3Q 2021.

◉ IBM Storage support for Ansible®, the Red Hat® open-source IT configuration management and automation platform, continues to be enhanced — including automation for HyperSwap for high-availability configurations for mission-critical workloads.

◉ IBM is simplifying support for IBM FlashSystem with a new IBM Storage Expert Care program, initially available with IBM FlashSystem 5200. It includes Base and Advanced support levels with transparent, predictable pricing and a choice of support duration.

“The University of Miami has deployed IBM storage through many product generations, including FlashSystem,” says Joel Zysman, Director of Advanced Computing Systems, UM Institute for Data Science and Computing. “One of the best things about this IBM storage platform is how well it evolves to meet our ever-changing business and technology demands. I can see that the new 5200 model can continue this trend. It is designed to be more cost-efficient, flexible, functional with simplified support options. We look forward to getting the newest generation into our hybrid cloud environment.”

Today, IBM also announces support of FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Spectrum Virtualize, IBM Elastic Storage® System (ESS) and IBM Spectrum Scale for IBM Cloud Satellite®,7 currently in beta. This enables you to “bring your own infrastructure” to hybrid cloud environments. IBM Cloud Satellite is being designed to help enable you to launch consistent cloud services anywhere — across any cloud, on premises, and at the edge with speed and simplicity, delivered as a service from a single pane of glass, managed through the public cloud. The result can potentially include increased efficiency and simplicity. When deploying IBM Cloud Satellite on premises, IBM FlashSystem can be the ideal storage solution.

Today’s announcements span a broad range of solutions for your container, hybrid cloud and virtualized environments. But the message is simpler — literally. Through ongoing innovation and engineering commitment, IBM continues to reduce IT complexity and make storage simple for organizations of all sizes.

In addition, IBM Storage will donate up to $1M to COVID-19 relief. Proceeds will come from FlashSystem 5000 and 5200 sales. You are encouraged to use #IBMFlash4Good on social media to help promote our cause.

Source: ibm.com

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Going beyond Women’s History Month: Celebrating & empowering women scientists

We kick off Women’s History Month and look forward to celebrating International Women’s Day on March 8. At IBM, we are committing to the theme of “Women Rising,” which has personal and professional resonance for me as a woman in what unfortunately continues to be predominantly male fields: science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). In fact, although women account for half of the US’s college-educated workforce, they only make up 28 percent of the STEM workforce and 13 percent of inventors.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

And while we have made progress in both hiring and representation for global women and underrepresented minorities in the US over the last three years at IBM, we know we can and must do more to ensure women feel empowered to be their authentic selves, to build their skills, and rise to their full potential.

At IBM Research, we value a diverse and inclusive workforce — and we recognize that we need women researchers and scientists more than ever to solve some of world’s greatest challenges. And we are facing an unprecedented magnitude of complex global issues that can threaten our future if left unchecked. For example, climate change, viruses impacting human health and livelihood, threats to our food supply, and widening inequality are just a few. Through IBM’s advancements — many of which were achieved by women — in hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other science fields, we have a unique opportunity to make important contributions to society through our diverse teams.

In order to create a culture and climate within and outside of IBM Research that embraces, supports, and enables successful careers in STEM, we need to work together every day to hire, empower, and grow women in STEM fields.

The data is clear: Diverse teams are more innovative and solve problems faster. As part of my commitment to tackling the issue of empowering women in science, I’m proud to serve as one of the executive sponsors of the IBM Research Diversity & Inclusion Council, which is responsible for ensuring IBM Research is leveraging our innovation and influence to make meaningful changes in support of diversity, inclusion, and racial justice.

To celebrate Women’s History Month, we will spotlight women researchers and scientists from various disciplines, experiences, and tenures at IBM Research and share their insights about their role at IBM, career journeys, inspirations, and guidance for fellow women in STEM.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM Power Systems announces new hybrid cloud capabilities

Envision your data center a year from today. What has changed? Have you gained efficiency? Lowered costs? Increased agility and flexibility? These are just a few of the goals IBM Power Systems™ clients are focused on as they seek to integrate and extend their most mission-critical applications into hybrid cloud environments. The journey to hybrid cloud requires a variety of tools — not a one-size-fits-all approach — to successfully transform your operations.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

Today we are announcing new capabilities available on the IBM Power Systems platform to help meet your business needs, no matter what point you are at in transforming your data center for the hybrid cloud era. You will have more options to leverage industry-leading scalability, reliability for VM based containerized applications and security built in at all layers from the processor to the OS. Clients can modernize their AIX®, IBM i and Linux® applications by deploying them in a hybrid cloud environment, automating common IT operations with Ansible, and co-locating containerized workloads with VM-based applications.

Unified enterprise hybrid cloud experience 

IBM Power Systems enables clients to move their mission-critical applications across hybrid cloud without refactoring or re-platforming. Now, we are adding more capabilities to provide a unified experience to acquire capacity in all Power®environments.

◉ IBM is extending that ability to hybrid cloud by piloting hybrid capacity credits, which can be purchased and used to unlock capacity on on-premises servers as well as on IBM Power Virtual Servers. IBM is also working with other ecosystem partners to further extend dynamic capacity across multiple Linux distributions.

◉ IBM is helping you to drive agility with new Ansible modules from Red Hat® Ansible® Certified Content for IBM Power Systems across your hybrid cloud deployments on AIX, IBM i and Linux environments. IBM Power Systems has added 22 new Ansible modules to the collection that bring new automation capabilities for common tasks like patch management, security management, OS & application deployment, continuous delivery, centralized backup and recovery, and virtualization management & provisioning, bringing the total number of POWER-supported Ansible modules to 102. Currently, there are 102 Ansible modules, downloaded more than 13,000 times since February 2021, that support POWER and are available to the open-source community on GitHub. Many of these same modules are available as production-ready, enterprise-hardened and certified Ansible Collections through the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.”

Modernize existing applications

Now you are well into mapping out your hybrid cloud data center and looking to the future with new workloads. IBM Power Systems remains committed to supporting the modernization of your existing applications and building new cloud-native workloads required for transformation and business growth. With a robust 10+ year roadmap for AIX and IBM i, we are committed to delivering capabilities and solutions to help you meet today’s needs and prepare for future challenges.

◉ AIX 7.3 is coming to your data center in 2021. It will continue a 35-year tradition of innovation with enhanced capabilities that deliver resiliency, security and scale needed to get your IT environment ready for hybrid cloud.

◉ For clients who cannot upgrade currently or need more time to upgrade to IBM i 7.3, we are now supporting IBM i 7.1 on Power Systems Virtual Server co-located with IBM Cloud®.

Build new application services

IBM Power Systems continues to deliver modern capabilities to simplify the build of new cloud-native applications with OpenShift, which can be co-located with your existing AIX and IBM i applications.

◉ Simplify and accelerate private cloud deployments with the new IBM Power Systems Private Cloud Rack Solution. This is a pre-configured system with compute, storage, networking and pre-installed software to match an organization’s existing infrastructure, whether it is based around Linux, IBM i or AIX. It can help organizations operationalize their cloud management and provide an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment to help clients accelerate development and operations for Kubernetes container-based cloud-native applications with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

◉ Expand into public cloud with Red Hat OpenShift® on Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift’s platform-agnostic installer. IBM Power Virtual Server is an enterprise IaaS offering built around IBM POWER9™, offering low-latency access to over 200 IBM Cloud services. In addition, IBM Power Virtual Server clients can now run leading business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.

◉ Red Hat Runtimes are now available on Power Systems, delivering a consistent development experience for applications that span across Power and other platforms.

Imagine your data center in 2022 and beyond. With our approach to continue delivering new capabilities, IBM Power Systems gives you the right infrastructure platform and co-optimized solutions to power your hybrid enterprise now and into the future!

Source: ibm.com

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Improve IT infrastructure with IBM hybrid cloud storage for IBM Cloud Satellite

The majority of organizations today use a mix of on-premises, edge and public cloud infrastructure. This should be no surprise: according to one recent study, companies derive up to 2.5x the value from hybrid cloud than from a single-cloud, single-vendor approach. But as environments grow, pain points related to managing applications across various IT infrastructures grow as well.

Left unchecked, these challenges – including a lack of visibility, maintaining regulatory compliance and latency issues – can lead to decreased productivity, compromised data security and negative user experiences.

So how can you solve these problems and continue to capitalize on hybrid and multicloud adoption?

Enter IBM® Cloud Satellite™, which provides standardized, consistent cloud services across all on-premises, edge and public cloud infrastructure from any cloud vendor. It helps you to manage applications with full visibility across all environments, improving developer productivity, data security and customer experiences.

To understand how IBM Cloud Satellite brings hybrid cloud to the edge, watch our explainer video.

Choosing the right storage solution for IBM Cloud Satellite

IBM Cloud Satellite is supported by IBM hybrid cloud software-defined storage (SDS) solutions: IBM Spectrum® Virtualize and IBM Spectrum® Scale. Deploying IBM Cloud Satellite on premises allows you to choose which storage infrastructure to use:

◉ Block storage: IBM FlashSystem® family and IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), both built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize

◉ File storage: IBM Elastic Storage® System (ESS) or an IBM Spectrum Scale software-defined solution

In many cases, this means you can use the IBM storage you already have, which speeds initial implementation, likely reduces costs and means you don’t have to learn how to use a whole new type of storage.

For system data and for high-performance applications such as database workloads, block storage may be your best choice. IBM FlashSystem family and SVC offer enterprise-class storage function, NVMe high performance and great ease of use. All members of the family are built with the same IBM Spectrum Virtualize software. This means that for multiple Satellite deployments, all of your storage works the same way and there’s nothing to re-learn. IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud provides the same storage functionality on IBM Cloud, AWS, and soon Microsoft Azure, which simplifies hybrid cloud storage deployments.

For analytics and AI workloads, file storage may be your best choice. ESS nodes deliver either high-performance NVMe storage technology or high-capacity low-cost storage. This gives users the ability to match the storage to their needs. In addition, ESS comes equipped with the industry-leading global data access and unified data services of IBM Spectrum Scale.

Adding ESS nodes multiplies throughput and capacity to over yottabyte scalability and can be integrated into a federated global storage system. By consolidating storage requirements from cloud to edge to the core data center, IBM Spectrum Scale and ESS can simplify storage management and data access and eliminate data silos.

Soaring with Satellite

IBM Storage solutions integrate with IBM Cloud Satellite using Container Storage Interface and come with Satellite templates to simplify deployment. In addition, these solutions are supported with extensive Red Hat® Ansible® automation playbooks.

These storage solutions enable you to share your storage infrastructure—and in the case of ESS and IBM Spectrum Scale, data too—between IBM Cloud Satellite and your existing platforms, including VMware, IBM Power, and bare metal servers. That means that as your workload deployments change, you can retain your storage infrastructure, helping to save costs and maintain consistency.

IBM FlashSystem and SVC go a step further: Their ability to “virtualize” over 500 existing storage systems from IBM and others means that you can use practically any storage with IBM Cloud Satellite with just a small investment in one of these systems.

These solutions are award-winning and proven for hybrid cloud Red Hat OpenShift® container environments. They are integrated and tested with IBM Cloud Satellite.

Key takeaway: IBM Storage solutions provide a single namespace across all workloads and multiple clouds with automated data movement and local high-performance access, optimizing both performance and cost for hybrid clouds. Whichever workloads you plan to deploy with Satellite, there’s an IBM Storage solution available.

Source: ibm.com

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8 reasons why IBM Power Systems is your app modernization foundation

Application modernization comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s not always easy to know where to start. So, over the next few minutes, we’ll showcase the strengths and benefits that IBM Power Systems™ brings to your modernization efforts. Sure, there are many more benefits than we’ll cover here. For more in-depth analysis tips and recommendations to help you determine the complexity of your applications and a modernization path forward, you can check out our Field Guide to Application Modernization on IBM Power Systems.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

Power Systems is built for core enterprise applications and for the next wave of digital transformation fueled by application modernization. Here are the major benefits of modernizing with IBM Power Systems:

1: Flexible, efficient utilization

You can manage spikes in demand and support more cloud workloads per server with IBM PowerVM® hypervisor on-demand CPU capacity. It manages demand by sharing pools of CPU cores across Red Hat® OpenShift® CoreOS nodes. These differentiating hypervisor constructs such as uncapped processors and shared processor pools provide the ability to guarantee performance SLAs while donating unused processor cycles to worker nodes in need of additional capacity. All this flexibility guarantees an 80 percent utilization on an IBM Power Systems E980 server.

2: More performance from software with fewer servers

You can buy fewer Power Systems servers to run an equivalent set of applications at comparable throughput levels than on competing platforms. That’s because it enables you to use 3.2X more containers per core with more CPU threads, achieve 2.6X better price performance (based on the number of containers), and collocate cloud-native apps with AIX, IBM i and Linux® virtual machine-based apps and enterprise data to exploit low-latency API connections to business-critical data. Plus, you can leverage sub-capacity licensing to greatly reduce containerized software license costs (IBM Cloud Pak Solutions, for example) using PowerVM shared processor pools, allowing CPU cores to be autonomously shared across Red Hat OpenShift worker nodes without sacrificing app performance.

3: Superior performance for your enterprise data

Running Red Hat OpenShift in a virtual machine adjacent to your AIX, IBM i or Linux virtual machines provides low-latency secure communication to your enterprise data with PowerVM Virtual I/O Server. This provides superior performance due to fewer network hops. It also allows for highly secure communication between your new cloud-native apps and your enterprise data stores as network traffic never has to leave the physical server.

4: Proven security and resiliency

To meet today’s security challenges, it’s essential that every layer of your company’s IT hardware and software stack remains secured. IBM Power Systems customers utilize the most reliable mainstream server platform to innovate and get to market faster without compromising security. Power Systems’ multi-layered approach to security gives you full visibility of your hardware and software. It protects the stack with comprehensive end-to-end security at every layer — including functionality that allows containers to remain secure, during and after deployment — all with a simple web-based UI.

5: Trusted and proven foundation

Kubernetes provides the core foundation for modernizing your enterprise applications. As the premier open-source container orchestration platform, it benefits both developers and IT administrators. Your developers have access to the latest software innovations to build software faster while your IT administrators can easily observe, operate and manage the platform and infrastructure. This helps you deliver high-value, high-quality software faster to end users. All of this is enabled through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

6: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid multicloud deployments. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation; it is fully supported on all IBM Power Systems servers (IBM POWER8® processors or later).

7: IBM Cloud Pak solutions

Power Systems provides superior performance and economics for containerized workloads like IBM Cloud Pak enterprise-ready containerized software solutions for modernizing existing applications and developing new cloud-native apps that run on Red Hat OpenShift.

There are three main benefits: They are comprehensive and easy to use, they are supported by Red Hat and IBM, and they run anywhere Red Hat OpenShift runs. IBM Cloud Pak Solutions take a bundled approach that allows you to accelerate your modernization journey by packaging everything you need to get started — including Red Hat OpenShift and the apps that run on top of it. The IBM Cloud Pak solutions available on IBM Power Systems include IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, IBM Cloud Pak for Data and IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management.

8: Innovate with an extensive container software ecosystem

At the heart of any application modernization effort is a strong software ecosystem that allows teams to innovate using the latest technologies. Now more than ever, open-source communities are playing a significant role in organizations’ modernization journeys. IBM Power Systems not only runs your core business applications, but also a wide range of popular open-source and commercial container software.

When you choose Power Systems to modernize, you choose industry-leading reliability, performance and security, as well as superior compute performance for data-intense and mission-critical applications. It is a foundation for modern container-based applications.

Source: ibm.com

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