Preventing a Digital Dark Age
(Courtesy: joi.ito.com/weblog/wiki/)
 As the volume of digital information continues to grow, individuals and businesses face ever-growing data archiving and retention problems. Data generated 20 years ago on a 5.25" floppy disk will likely become impossible to access in the near future. Becoming digital,may be entering a new "Dark Age" in which business, public and personal assets are at risk of being lost due to changing technologies. IBM Research is working to preserve myriad types of information, such as scientific, financial, healthcare, artistic, and cultural data for tens and even hundreds of years.

Breakthrough Storage Performance:
Engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California have demonstrated performance results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by over 250% demonstrating the impact solid-state technologies can have on how businesses and individuals manage and access information. Results were achieved using Flash solid state technology, coupled with IBM's highly scalable storage virtualisation technology. Codenamed "Project Quicksilver," IBM results in transferring data at a sustained rate of over 1m input/output per second - with response time under 1 millisecond. Compared to the fastest industry benchmarked disk system, Quicksilver improved performance1 by 250% at less than 1/20th response time, needed 1/5th the floor space and only 55 % of the power and cooling.

Revolution in Storage Technology:
(Right:Courtesy: http://www.techchee.com/)
In April, IBM outlined its computer memory milestone that could lead to electronic devices capable of storing far more data in the same amount of space than is possible currently. In  the next decade, "racetrack" memory  could lead to solid state electronic devices - no moving parts, and thus more durable - capable of holding far more data in the same amount of space than currently. The technology could enable a handheld device such as an mp3 player to store about 500,000 songs or 3,500 movies, 100x today performance with far lower cost and power consumption.

Unparalleled Processing of Real Time Data:
IBM's System S rapidly analyses data as it streams from a variety of sources to help organisations increase speed and accuracy of decision making. For example, a financial services client is piloting stream computing from IBM Stream Computing Software running on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer - to examine thousands of real-time information sources to capitalise on up-to-the-minute market changes.
(Left: The protein folding challenge for computational biology. Courtesy IBM Research media photo collection)

New Computing Paradigms for business advantage: IBM is working on select prototypes of Information Cloud Services to deploy its information infrastructure across groups of servers accessed remotely from the "cloud" from various  devices.

Power Management for Storage: As servers become larger and faster,  disks and capacities become bigger. Components  get smaller and speedier and create greater heat density.
(Enhance power, stretching dollara.  Illustration Bill Cigliano.http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com)
Reducing  energy consumption of IT systems is a major challenge.  After intensive studies of the factors that affect power usage in storage systems, IBM researchers have  new algorithms
and models being incorporated into capacity planning tools to estimate power consumption of different storage controller components for various workloads characteristics. These  are targeted at helping SMBs, archives, and enterprises better manage storage power resources.

Through home-grown innovation, development and acquisitions, this marks a $2bn  investment, three years of research and development, and a global team of more than 2,500 storage technical professionals, engineers and researchers from nine different countries including France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, Switzerland, United States, and the United Kingdom. Key strategy acquisitions of XIV, Diligent, Cognos, Arsenal, Optim, FilesX, Softek, and NovusCG over the last year  add to the strongest ever information infrastructure portfolio of offerings.

These new tools and offerings for the IBM information infrastructure will allow clients to streamline  data centers with highly integrated storage, focused around archive, compliance, retention, and security to help clients deliver information as a service to their consumer customers, who look for  information access at any time from any device. These tools and technology resources which IBM has been developing and amassing, open doors to new industry collaboration, and on demand storage technologies – a key to the emergence of cloud computing.

Products Web: www.ibm.com/systems/storage/products/showcase/index.html
Infrastructure: http://www.ibm.com/information_infrastructure
Research: http://www.ibm.com/research.
Fascinating: "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow "
Visualizations: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=985692.985765&type=series