A Smarter Planet Blog

Carnegie Mellon builds lab for smarter planet research

2010-07-29T16:30:02Z

You name it. The faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University who are connected with the Center for Sensed Critical Infrastructure Research (CenSCIR) are busy applying smarter-planet technologies and thinking to practically any system of physical infrastructure. Now, in connection with IBM, the organization’s leaders are creating a physical place to serve as sort of a clubhouse for researchers and organizations that want to tap into their brain power.

The IBM Smarter Infrastructure Lab, announced today, is going to be a 1,000-square-foot facility within one of the the university’s buildings. It will be equipped with engineering workstations, 3-D displays, a telepresence set up, massive data storage capabilities, and access to powerful clusters of number-crunching computers. “Here, people can organize and visualize their work. It will be a showcase for what we do,” says James H. Garrett, Jr., the co-director of CenSCIR and head of CMU’s civil and environmental engineering department.

Roads, bridges, locks, dams, you name it

The folks at CMU have been focusing on infrastructure research for more than a decade, but they set up CenSCIR four years ago to provide more of a formal structure for their work. It’s an interdisciplinary approach, with participation from the schools of engineering, computer science, architecture, social sciences, and business.

Garrett is possessed by a burning sense of urgency. He’s concerned that the decline of the physical infrastructure in the United States is going to adversely affect not only safety but the country’s economic vitality. “Some nations spend a lot more of their GDP on maintenance of the infrastructure than we do,” he says. “Here, infrastructure doesn’t come to mind until things collapse. That’s no way to manage this very important piece of the economy.”

When the Lab is set up I’ll visit and create a video tour for the Smarter Planet blog.

Technorati Tags: Carnegie Mellon University, CenSCIR, IBM, James H. Garrett, Jr.

Guest Post: Smarter buildings – a practical application for the internet of things

2010-07-29T03:34:49Z

Instrumented and interconnected objects like refrigerators, freezers or even coffee bars are allowing building managers to operate profitably.

Following is a guest post from David Bartlett:

Companies can measure and control energy consumption in ways previously impossible, using the combination of low-cost sensors, controls, robust wireless mesh networks and ubiquitous access to the internet. That’s the gist of a deal IBM announced today with Tridium Corp., a division of Honeywell. Tridium makes sensors and the software found in a huge variety of commercial devices and structures.

Tridium’s products enable the control of virtually any device. Along with the typical HVAC and lighting systems in any office building, you’d also find Tridium’s gear in gas pumps, commercial ovens, retailers’ freezers and automated car washes. We plan to integrate our Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management and Maximo Asset Management software into Tridium’s software to create secure, Internet-enabled networks that will allow for new levels of energy management, integrate hundreds of disparate systems and devices, and analyze vast streams of real-time data.

When the new solutions hit the market (stay tuned for more details on timing) building managers will be looking at technology that can slash energy use and waste by as much as 50%. Using this technology to trim energy costs can amount to big savings – if the five million commercial buildings and structures in the U.S. were able to improve energy efficiency just 10%, more than $20 billion in savings could flow back to owners and shareholders.

But cutting energy costs and curbing greenhouse gasses is only part of the picture. As we fully integrate our solutions we’ll be able to apply the type of automation and analytics to the physical world that we take for granted in the digital world, making everyday tasks more efficient in the process. Think of the coffee bar at your local convenience store. Some of them brew a decent cup of java and need a fair amount of maintenance in the process. Today’s systems simply alert the clerk that there is a problem. Usually when it’s already broken. Instead of profits walking out the door with disappointed customers, our systems will automatically generate work orders and dispatch repairmen to the scene before the store manager is even aware that a problem is “brewing.”

David Bartlett is IBM’s vice president of Industry Software Solutions.

CovJam sets city on route to become smarter

2010-07-27T15:26:13Z

Back in June I mentioned how Coventry was running the worlds first city-wide Jam to open up a conversation with residents and business to find innovative ways to make the city smarter.

A month on and 2,000 posts later, IBM and Coventry are teaming up to make the ideas raised in CovJam real and transforming Coventry over the next 30 years.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Martin Reeves, Chief Executive of Coventry City Council explained:

“The IBM Jam brought out practical ideas. People know that we can’t change overnight, that we need to take baby steps to being a smarter city with low-cost, practical projects. I was really impressed with some straightforward, not very costly ideas that people would like us to implement over the next few years.”

With cities getting larger, facing tougher economic and environmental pressures than ever before this type of idea generation is setting the tone and direction for using what resources are available in an efficient manner. Directing those resources towards the things that people really need to attract inward investment, improve employment prospects, personal security and quality of life.

You may think that this type of interaction with residents would restrict the participation of some groups in older age groups, far from it. 28% of those that declared their age group we over 50.

IBM will continue to analyse the data and unearth valuable insight that will inform Coventry’s Sustainable Community Strategy. As Reeves pointed out, this is just the start:

“The CovJam represents the start of a new open and honest dialogue between the City Council and its residents. We’re willing to take risks and be innovative in order to build closer, more dynamic relationships with all our stakeholders.”

The first idea – to guide tourists from the railway station to the city centre - is already being put into action and more will feature in future planning initiatives.

Press release available

Technorati Tags: business, citizens, cityscan, Coventry, IBM, idea, jam, redevelopment

Reaching Bushmen in the Kalahari

2010-07-23T10:11:06Z

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In Namibia, they have a completely different understanding of the phenomenon of “mobile banking” than we do in the United States. For the past two years, the First National Bank of Namibia has been dispatching small trucks–really, banks on wheels–to make the rounds of far-flung settlements in the vast Kalahari Desert, in southeastern Africa. The vans are equipped with computers and connected to the bank’s network via a satellite data communications hookup. It’s the old bookmobile idea transplanted to Africa and banking.

This intriguing bit of news comes from Stephen Lloyd van Rhyn, the bank’s head of information technology, who late last year installed an IBM mainframe at the bank’s headquarters. van Rhyn spoke at yesterday’s launch of the zEnterprise mainframe in New York City. Thanks to the reliability of the computer, he said, “we can set up accounts for bushmen in the Kalahari.”

: Source: Wikimedia Commons

Technorati Tags: First National Bank of Namibia, IBM, mainframe, mobile banking

zEnterprise 196: What the hybrid means for business

2010-07-22T21:58:53Z

Karl’s note: The following is a guest post by Jim Porell, Distinguished Engineer and System z Evangelist.

Jim Porell, Distinguished Engineer

System zEnterprise – the new server on the block, but in doing so, taking the best of many servers and putting them together as a “System of Systems.” Its goal is to make a business smarter. Let’s look at how.

Moore’s law has demonstrated that annually each server platform should get faster and cheaper on a regular basis and to that end, most servers, IBM and otherwise, have done just that. From a customer point of view, many have built silos of operations. For example, transaction processing on a mainframe, data warehouse on UNIX servers and web portals on PC servers. Across a business, data is copied regularly, there are multiple operational domains and there could be many, many servers, eating up valuable floor space, energy and administrative personnel.

IBM saw this complexity and wanted to help customers simplify and make things smarter. Through the efforts of over 5000 developers and engineers, across 18 laboratories, three years of effort and over $1.5B in R&D spending, the zEnterprise was developed. With cross platform virtualization at it’s core, over 100,000 virtual images, spread across System z and select Power7 and System x blades, can be managed from a single console. The Remote Support Facility – a call home capability for system diagnostics introduced on the mainframe in the late 1980’s and several years before a like minded service known as OnStar was introduced to vehicles, has also been extended to those blades. As such, early warnings and simplified diagnostics are possible for a cross-platform workflow.

Customers are already benefiting from this collaboration of systems. Where previously, data was copied between server domains, it can now be shared. Customers have seen improvements of 5 to 10 times better response in analytic queries. Queries times have dropped from hours to mere seconds to provide true business insight instead of the hindsight available with copied data. Other customers have seen that co-locating applications and data can provide a 100% improvement in throughput with a 50% reduction in database processing using DB2 for z/OS.

How much electricity does the zEnterprise z196 use? It can be about the same as a domestic electric clothes dryer. In fact, each processor, of its up to 80 mainframe cores, uses less than a 40 watt light bulb. And if you like Linux servers, you can host them for as little as a $1 a day.

The results: fewer servers, less floor space, cooling and electricity and less complexity. Instead of having workloads fit for the politics of different administrative domains, a business can leverage the best of the IBM servers while improving the overall reliability, security, governance, risk and compliance activities. zEnterprise can help any business deploy smarter solutions.

Technorati Tags: datacenter, green, Hardware, IBM System z, systemofsystems

Big Iron Makes the Data Center Smarter

2010-07-22T11:56:29Z

Big Iron never dies. Forty-six years after the first IBM mainframe models were introduced, our company is launching a new generation of the machines today in New York City. The zEnterprise series offers the kinds of performance you’d expect: The top-of-the line machine is equipped with 96 powerful processors running at a blazing-fast 5.2Ghz, together capable of executing more than 50 billion instructions per second. In an era when PC servers run tens of applications simultaneously in virtualization mode, this model can run run more than 100,000. It’s like a computing cloud in a box.

While the sheer performance numbers for zEnterprise are impressive, it also represents a major step forward in our efforts to make corporate computing smarter.

A key element of the launch is IBM Unified Resource Manager, a software innovation built into the systems that integrates a mainframe with Unix and PC blade servers as if they’re a single machine, with all of the security and reliably of the mainframe. We believe that in the not-too-distant future, the modern data center will no longer be a vast array of different types of devices and chunks of software but, instead, will be best understood as a single computing system, encompassing processing, memory, storage, networking, and all of the software and services that go with it. Conceptually and operationally, it will be one large machine. Unified Resource Manager is an important step in that direction.

This isn’t just some fancy technology trick that we’re doing because we can. The world of business computing is in the midst of a profound shift, driven by a convergence of forces. Digital intelligence is being injected into the world’s physical systems through pervasive instrumentation and global interconnectivity. That’s generating an exponential increase in the volume, quality, and speed of data. At the same time, doing business is growing in complexity and the pace of business has quickened. Companies are under intense pressure to respond to the expectations of a new generation of young people raised on the Internet, the rapid emergence of new markets, and intensifying competition.

To deal with all of these developments, enterprises need to become smarter–gathering more and better information, making sense of it, and acting wisely and immediately on what they learn.

The problem is, computing, the world’s most important amplifier of human intelligence, isn’t as smart as it needs to be to handle today’s challenges and opportunities. Data centers cost too much to provision and operate. They’re overly complex, caused, in part, by the fact that even though all the various machines and software programs occupy the same physical space, they aren’t very well integrated with one another. And, finally, they don’t provide businesses with the information and capabilities they need in the form they need it quickly enough. This represents a crisis of IT complexity and inefficiency–and it will only get worse.

What’s required is a better approach to corporate computing. First, because the work of business is rapidly evolving, computing systems must be deployed that fit the new tasks at hand. Second, because new technologies are constantly being invented, systems should be designed to manage all of that diversity and to adapt to changes as they come along. And, lastly, because businesses demand speed and convenience, computing services should be designed and delivered in ways that make them more easily accessible and consumable.

Over its six decades in existence, the computer industry has shown a remarkable ability to innovate and to respond to changes in commerce and society. We’re confident that, with sound principles like these as guides and machines like zEnterprise, today’s challenges will be overcome and the march of progress will continue.

Technorati Tags: IBM, IBM Unified Rersource Manager, ZEnterprise

Sun World: Pervasive Analytics Improves Efficiency and Conservation

2010-07-21T10:13:47Z

California fruit grower Sun World International isn’t among the giants of agribusiness, but it punches above its weight class in global markets thanks in part to its use of business intelligence software. In fact, the Bakersfield, California-based company is one of the most pervasive users of data analytics that we’re aware of–in everything from farm operations and finance to sales and marketing. It’s also got an executive dashboard for tracking key performance metrics. “The notion of pervasive performance management is held up as an ideal, but there are few companies that actually do it. This is one of them,” says Tony Levy, a product marketing director in IBM’s Cognos business unit. Sun World International’s main suppliers of business intelligence software are IBM and Applied Analytix.

The company’s heavy reliance on data began five years ago after it was purchased by a private equity firm that brought in new management and insisted on improved performance. “These days, we ask questions, understand the numbers, and, most importantly, do something,” says Gordon Robertson, vice-president of sales and marketing.

From its 12,000 acres of land in California, Sun World International sells table grapes, stone fruit, peppers, and water melons worldwide. It also breeds its own varieties of plants and licenses its genetic intellectual property to other growers. Its brands including Superior Seedless grapes, Black Diamond plums, and Honeycot apricots. It employs about 7,000 people in the fields.

Here are some highlights of how it uses business intelligence:

–The sales team analyzes the profitability of each customer and concentrates on developing the most profitable segments. As a result, sales to those segments grew 20% last year, yielding an additional $3 million in revenues.

–The company evaluates the effect of different irrigation systems on crop yields. Its increased use of drip irrigation systems has decreased water usage by 8.5% since 2006.

–It uses data analysis to adjust the size of the vehicles and other equipment for harvesting and other farming tasks, which has reduced its consumption of fuel by 20% over the past five years.

–Its analysis of crop growing and harvesting equipment and techniques has reduced labor requirements by 10% to 15%. In one example, it changed the design of grape trellises so farm laborers could harvest grapes without having to bend over–which relieved their pain and increased productivity.

The software also allows Sun World International’s executives to move quickly when trouble strikes, as it did seven weeks ago when Australia restricted the import of California table grapes because of concerns about the spread of a breed of fruit flies. Using business intelligence software, the company’s sales executives quickly sized up potential customers in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan, and elsewhere in Asia to take up the slack. “We could react quickly,” says Robertson.

By being smart and fast, Sun World International proves that you don’t have to be a giant to compete successfully against them.

Technorati Tags: Applied Analytix, IBM, Sun World

Building a Smarter Data Center

2010-07-20T12:47:28Z

Editor’s Note: The following post by Stephen L. Sams, vice president of site and facilities services for IBM, underscores the need for CIOs to more effectively manage growth in their data centers. If data centers are allowed to grow organically, CIOs can find themselves adding unnecessary resources, increasing the power demands and carbon footprints of their data centers beyond the needs of their business workloads. This post helps CIOs understand the importance of building a modular and flexible data center for more energy efficiency now and in the future.

How do you build a data center to last 20 years when information technology is changing every 2 years

In the new economic environment, uncertainty, volatility and complexity seem to be at an all time high – and they are still rising. Business processes are becoming more interconnected and global. Standout CEO’s are focused on how to manage in a more complex environment by creating value through new perspectives, deeper insights and more information. For CEO’s and their organizations, avoiding complexity is not an option — the choice comes in how they respond to it.

CIOs can play an important role in the enterprise by developing a vision of innovation enabled by IT. How well you manage your data centers to raise the return on investment of IT infrastructure, to expand the business impact of data center operations and to make innovation real determines the level of your success. Since data centers are long-term and somewhat static investments – needing to last 20 years while the technology inside changes every 2 to 3 years – it becomes an imperative that you plan strategies to be able to react to dynamic changes.

IBM’s data center family features innovation around a modular approach which helps solve three key ways to design a smarter data center.

Be flexible to handle unpredictable changes in demand. Because demands for IT capacity are unrelenting and often unpredictable, CIOs have found it difficult to design an optimum data center to meet future needs. In IBM’s Global CIO study, CIO’s indicated a need for 50 percent less capacity or 200 percent more capacity – just in the near term. Trying to be accurate with a 20 year projection is impossible for any organization. As CIO’s determine how to meet future demands from new computing models such as cloud computing – it is clear that building data centers in smaller increments – or modules – provides the flexibility to align business and IT needs in a key requirement.

Be able to adapt to changes in technology. Your business needs the processing power to drive the applications which run your business. Yet with power densities of new servers growing over 20 times in the past decade, supporting the increased energy demands of new technology remains the #1 concern of data center managers. Our plug and play approach provides you the ability to support new technology by spending 5-10 percent now in order to have the ability to grow up to 3 times the power increase in a single module -without disrupting your operations to achieve it.

Be responsive to managing demand. Changing business models mean clients need to non-disruptively move workloads within and between data centers to adjust to changes in business demand. This requires an integrated system to connect IT, data centers and building management systems to sense and respond dynamically to these changes. During the initial design of a new data center clients need to integrate their decisions to include the operational management areas to insure the data center can maintain availability, optimize capacity, and reduce energy consumption.

Designing data centers is a complex task and cannot be driven by one company. IBM’s has built an eco-system of partners from multiple companies to allow us to go-to-market on a global scale with support for our modular data center design approach.

Steve Sams is vice president of site and facilities services for IBM.

Watch the video about IBM Business Partners who can help create more efficient data centers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recently, I spoke with Darryl Taft at eWeek to showcase how Green IT and our Enterprise Modular Data Center approach can actually provide a much more efficient and competitive infrastructure to support emerging business requirements. Read the full article “IBM Offers Green IT Advice” at the eWeek site.–Stephen Sams.

Africa: The Next Frontier for Info Tech

2010-07-19T20:58:45Z

Credit: Luca Galuzzi Wikimedia Commons

One of the notable messages to come from IBM’s quarterly earnings report today was the strength of demand for technology in developing markets. Revenues in our growth markets represented 20% of overall revenues and they’re growing faster–expanding by 14% compared to 2% for overall revenues.

While the lion’s share of the demand comes from large, fast-growing economies such as China, India, and Brazil, the entire developing world is starting to take advantage of the transformative potential of information technology. Africa, too.

Consider Namibia. Late last year, the First National Bank of Namibia bought and installed an IBM mainframe computer. That may sound like overkill until you realize why the bank went that route and what it plans to do with the big machine.

Namibia is a desert country in southeastern Africa, with a population of just 2 million. Previously, the bank, which is the largest in the country, had its computing done by its parent company in neighboring South Africa. But that caused problems: outages and latency. So the bank decided to buy its own machine to better serve its network of 50 branches and 200 ATMs. “You’re in a developing nation, so your infrastructure isn’t as sound as elsewhere, but you still want to provide superior service to your clients,” says Stephen Lloyd van Rhyn, the bank’s Head of Information Technology. He says the mainframe has done the trick: “It’s super reliable, like the old diesel engines. It just runs and runs. And it’s energy-efficient, too.”

So far, van Rhyn says, the bank is only using about 10% of the capacity of the mainframe, but that’s going to change. He’s gradually moving additional computing applications to the machine, with the goal, potentially, of achieving a bank in a box. At the same time, the parent company, First Rand Ltd., is expanding in neighboring countries. Currently, they have operations in Botswana, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique. They’re considering using the mainframe in Namibia to support the expansion strategy.

What FNB is doing illustrates the potential for bringing advanced computing capabilities to places that have very little now. Some of southern Africa’s economies are perking up, and computing can help sustain and even accelerate that momentum. The goal: A smarter Africa.

Technorati Tags: First National Bank of Namibia, IBM, mainframe, Namibia

A three-year bet. Medical Doctors join IBM to help solve health conundrum

2010-07-15T15:30:01Z

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today IBM announced a three year Research investment to help medical practitioners and insurance companies provide high-quality, evidence-based care to patients and reduce costs. As part of this initiative, IBM is hiring medical doctors to work alongside its researchers to develop new technologies, scientific advancements, and business processes for healthcare and insurance providers.

Robert Sorrentino, M.D., is one of our new physicians, who has joined IBM Research to bring new insight to how technology can make healthcare smarter. Following is a guest post from Dr. Sorrentino:

A career ER physician, Chief Medical Officer, and healthcare executive in a hospital and HMO, I recently joined IBM as part of its healthcare transformation research group at IBM Research – Watson in New York. While this may seem an unusual move to some, I see it as the culmination of a number of factors finally coming together to improve the quality of patient care on a grand scale. The possibilities are thrilling — and the reason I’m here.

Originally, I didn’t plan to become a physician. While studying physics at MIT, I helped lead a research effort to develop software tools and databases for physicians, psychologists and other healthcare workers to conduct clinical research. That helped revitalize my interest in medicine and I ended up at medical school. Now, the winding road of my medical career has serendipitously brought me to IBM Research, which I didn’t anticipate either.

During my residency training, I worked in a clinical practice environment that was a forerunner of today’s Patient-centered Medical Home. Teams of family physicians were responsible for coordinating care, but we never worked alone. We had an internist, a pediatrician, an in-hospital physician, a pharmacist, a psychologist, nurse practitioners and health coaches, all of whom collaborated with the PCPs, but most of all, they supported the patients and ensured that their care needs were met in a multi-disciplinary way. It made a lasting impression on me as the way medicine should be practiced.

The other thing that made a permanent impression on me was the immense amount of paperwork that was required to provide this care. The manual systems for coordinating care; the forms to be filed to obtain authorization for medical services and get claims paid; ever-present patient questions and frustrations with this system. When I thought about it, it seemed clear that some sort of computer automation had to be possible to simplify these tasks. My medical informatics experience was begging to be used to develop a solution, but at that time, we used a slow, inflexible hospital information system to service these functions.

I began to see that there was a bigger picture – a way to apply my clinical experience with individual patients to becoming a physician overseeing the care of tens or hundreds of thousands of patients — and years later here I am. Having worked across the spectrum of healthcare, I have a unique perspective on not only how technology can be useful in the field with patients but also for how it can improve the delivery of healthcare services.

At IBM Research, I will be working on the design and implementation of novel payment models to improve the way healthcare is paid for and better align financial incentives so that physicians and other providers are paid for delivering better outcomes and quality of care, rather than for higher volume of medical services. I will also be applying my experience as a physician, along with my medical informatics knowledge, to help develop clinical decision intelligence tools that can better inform clinicians about clinical diagnostic and treatment choices and make it more accessible at the point-of-care. I will be closely collaborating with experts in areas like machine learning, data mining, simulation and deep analytics along with our clients and partners in healthcare.

These projects are challenging, but gratifying for the potential longer-term improvements in healthcare delivery that may result. I really feel like we are at an inflection point and the story of healthcare transformation is just beginning. I hope to share new developments here from time to time.

I am excited to now be joining IBM to use that knowledge to build technologies and services from the ground up with some of the world’s foremost experts in science and technology.