IBM announcements - an overview

IBM made quite some interesting announcements this week. I'll just start by giving you a short overview, but I'm surely coming back to some of them in my next posts.

• DB2 10 goes beta as announced in 'IBM DB2 10 for z/OS launches beta program (ZP10-0015)'. As you can see the naming convention stays the same. The beta program starts on March 12, 2010. No idea when it will become generally available. If you want to know more about its functionalities, then you should take a look at Willie Favero's blog. He has a great post on DB2 10.
• It's also the time of year for the preview announcement of the next release of z/OS, so here we go : 'Preview: z/OS V1.12 - Heralding a new generation of smart operating systems (ZP10-0110)'. And apparently a new release of z/OS also means a new and enhanced release of z/OSMF : "z/OSMF V1.12 is planned to be expanded with the addition of z/OS Workload Manager Policy Editor functionality, enhancements to the already valuable Incident Log and Configuration Assistant for the z/OS Communications Server functions, and the ability to add non-z/OSMF application launch points and links".
  
• Here's one I like particulary because it's new for the System z community. IBM took over Diligent in 2008 because of Diligents de-duplication technology. Up to now the Protectier deduplication Gateway was only available for distributed systems. It's a virtual tape solution that emulates LTO tape drives and writes the data to an attached disk array. But, in the meantime it also de-duplicates the data which can lead up to a 'compression' factor of 25 times. Now this technology has also become available for System z. There are two announcements, one for the hardware and one for the software part. I'm definitely going to elaborate on these announcements in one of my future posts.
• A bit out of my league perhaps but we also had the announcement of the Power7 engine and some new models. The press release gives a good overview of this new announcement : 'IBM Unveils New POWER7 Systems To Manage Increasingly Data-Intensive Services'. I just have to mention this one as this will normally become the engine for a future generation DS8000.
• And before I forget it, we already had the announcement of GDPS V3.7 last week : 'IBM GDPS V3.7: Enterprise-wide infrastructure continuous availability and disaster recovery (ZS10-0013)'.