IBM Launches Blade Migration Center; Offers HP Customers $1,000 to Migrate to Industry-Leading IBM BladeCenter Platform

IBM Deploys Global Team of Over 300 Consultants to Help Customers Migrate to Smarter IT Platform Based on Blade Servers

ARMONK, NY - 20 Sep 2006: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the development of a Blade Migration Center aimed at helping clients escape the complexity of multiple incompatible architectures by migrating to a smarter IT platform, IBM BladeCenter. The program is backed by a global team of more than 300 consultants and technologists to help make it easy for clients to consolidate workloads onto the slim IT footprint of the blade server platform. IBM will also offer existing HP blade clients a US$1,000 incentive to make the switch.

“With the Blade Migration Center we’ve armed a global team of consultants with key tools, and collaborated with industry-leading technology vendors, to help clients easily migrate to blade servers to help simplify their datacenter infrastructure, reduce costs and improve business efficiency,” said Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter. “While HP has introduced three generations of blades with no backward compatibility, IBM has offered clients a consistent approach and superior design innovation for the world’s fastest growing server platform and the industry’s leading blade platform, IBM BladeCenter.”

The IBM Blade Migration Center will help clients consolidate, migrate and virtualize their IT infrastructures on IBM BladeCenter with both free and fee-based migration services to help speed and simplify the process for clients to avoid network downtime. IBM will also collaborate with IBM Business Partners to aid in their data migration services for clients, and provide easy access to key IBM technologies and a team of industry partners with solutions to address common areas of concern in datacenter re-design and migration, including virtualization, datacenter cooling, and high-speed networking.

Migration services will include:

* Assessment of current state and existing processes
* Requirement specification and future state definition
* Solution definition, architecture, and roadmap design
* Preparation and planning
* Skills transfer and training on best practices; and
* Implementation and integration assistance.

Migration consultants will have access to the IBM Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool (CDAT), breakthrough software that recognizes untapped utilization and hidden servers across clients’ networks and helps identify opportunities to consolidate and virtualize systems. To date the CDAT software has helped hundreds of customers identify and improve performance and in cases even quadruple a client’s computing utilization. Combined with IBM Director, the new software creates a powerful portfolio of datacenter automation and virtualization tools.

Key areas of focus for the Blade Migration Center include, but are not limited to:

* System Migration: With PlateSpin PowerConvert, clients can complete physical and virtual migration projects in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks by eliminating the need to re-provision new Windows and Linux servers from scratch. And with PlateSpin PowerRecon, clients can optimally match workloads and resources across systems to increase utilization rates.
* Virtualization: Cisco VFrame Server Fabric Virtualization Software helps dynamically change how a server is provisioned and enables rapid service deployment by transforming servers into pools of reconfigurable, diskless servers. IBM’s SAN Volume Controller helps clients manage heterogeneous storage as a business resource by combining IBM and non-IBM storage capacity into a single managed storage pool. SAN Volume Controller delivers one of the fastest storage performance benchmarks ever recorded for all controllers and manages 15 petabytes of client data across storage vendors today.
* Data Center Cooling: IBM has teamed with Innovative Research, Inc. to provide clients access to “TileFlow,” a computer simulation tool to predict the cooling performance of a data center. With this thermal analysis tool, clients can develop an understanding of airflow patterns and temperature distribution in their data center to enable reliable cooling and maximum utilization of floor space. And IBM PowerExecutive will help clients “meter” actual power usage and trend data for any single physical system or group of systems to efficiently plan and utilize available power for maximum application performance.
* High-Speed Networking: Cisco Systems has developed high speed switches for the IBM Blade Center. These switches can eliminate up to 85 percent of cabling compared to rack switch solutions, simplify data center deployment time and cost, and reduce the potential for outages caused by cable failures.

IBM has shipped over half a million BladeCenter systems since the product’s inception in 2002. According to data from industry analyst firm Gartner, IBM retained its lead as the number one blade server vendor in the world garnering 42.8 percent revenue share in the second quarter 2006, 13 percent better than its closest competitor. (Gartner, Servers Quarterly Statistics United States: Database, 22 August 2006.)

To learn more about migrating to IBM BladeCenter, go to: www-03.ibm.com/systems/migratetoibm/bladecenter.html.

To participate in the IBM Blade Migration Center, clients can write to ibmbmc@us.ibm.com.

For more information about IBM, go to: www.ibm.com

*Note: This program is available globally; trade-out incentives vary by currency.

Contact Information

Vineeta Durani

IBM Media Relations

IBM

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