In their ongoing coverage of IBM Edge 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante spoke with John Borkenhagen, IBM CTO System X and BladeCenter. The three discuss disruptive technology, the blurring line between storage and servers.

Borkenhagen suggests when it comes to a big shift around storage, the big disruptive technology is flash memory. If a server goes down, whatever data is stored into flash is inaccessible unless it is copied. However, other uses for flash include flash cacheing. Databases are special code and database writers can modify them with flash. Borkenhagen suggests, “Eventually, you’ll see a database like hadoop, where the storage is right on the server itself. You’ll see database going that way as well where you do keep copies of the flash on other servers. It does give you the performance benefit.” Borkenhagen also notes that flash can be managed like a hard drive and storage controllers are being re-designed to support it.

Vellante adds meta data to the discussion. He explains, much data about data is locked up and flash provides users a resource to put metadata in and access it. Vellante adds, “I think the line is blurring between storage and servers.”

The panelists also discuss a shift in acceleration. When it comes to the decision of scaling up, management costs are a major influencing factor. Borkenhagen, suggests virtualization will help lower the administrative costs and simplifies the management. He adds a software defined network adds the same capabilities as another.

Referencing the growing OpenSource markets, Borkenhagen explains, “we participate fully in the OpenSource world.” This represents a shift as IBM used to be more exclusive.