As Uncle Sam prepares to write economic stimulus checks, IBM hopes to help Business Partners cash them. With that goal in mind, Big Blue has unveiled the Dynamic Infrastructure Specialty Program, which provides partners with sales, marketing and technical assistance and as much as $100,000 in business development funds.
Frankly, the IBM press release announcing the new program is about as complex as the Fed’s economic stimulus package. However, there are a few easy-to-spot themes. The program is designed for IBM Business partners that can:
- Integrate digital and physical infrastructure, providing the ability to use information technology to manage business processes, increasingly intelligent physical infrastructure and assets, and drive new and improved services as a result. This, IBM asserts, is known as “Service Management.”
- Help companies to manage, store, and analyze the 15 new petabytes of information the world is now generating per day– 8-times more information than in all US libraries combined.
- Reduce massive inefficiencies. Data centers costs, for example — for energy, space, etc. — have risen 8-times since 1996; and average distributed server utilization is just 6-15%.
Full disclosure: The above bullet points are taken nearly word-for-word from IBM’s announcement. And there are numerous IBM products (some old, some new) associated with this initiative. (See www.ibm.com/dynamicinfrastructure).
But the bottom line is this: As federal and local governments begin to spend the economic stimulus package on physical and IT projects, IBM wants to ensure its Business Partners are in the mix.
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The most massive inefficiency, which IBM and DevonIT are working on, is the desktop PC. There, utilization may average less 1% and there are usually many more client PCs in a system, than servers. Every PC that could be a fanless thin client should be a fanless thin client. If the servers are consolidated and working hard and the idling clients are wasting as little as possible the system is optimal.
IBM is pushing blade servers as terminal servers and DevonIT is pushing thin clients.
I have used both thin and thick clients and I cannot see more than a couple of roles for thick clients in all of IT, fullscreen video and games (probably not that important for business/office work). If you need more power than a thin client, you may have to move it to a cluster eventually anyway so most roles can be done very well on thin clients for half the power consumption. Since only about 10% of PCs are thin clients now, this could almost cut the energy consumption of IT in half. All it would take would be to max out the production of manufacturers of thin clients and ramp them up over a few years to change it all.
In the process of migrating to thin clients, we should also use ‘NIX-like OS like GNU/Linux because shared memory on the terminal server permits twice as many clients on a server or half the number of servers to serve the clients.
Besides the energy saving, the saving of space, heat, and noise in the workplace is very important.