Steve Kenniston, Global Storage Evangelist at IBM, and Randy Arsenault, Platform Strategy Consultant at IBM, discussed the latest storage trends, software-defined everything, open vs. proprietary and the future of flash with theCUBE host Dave Vellante at the 2013 edition of IBM Edge.

“I think it is a really exciting time,” for storage, Kenniston said. “You have the Hadoop on one side, and the services and storage,” along with computing and the new industry buzzword – software defined. Software will generate competitive advantage by enhancing all these components.

“You’ve got much more software content,” Arsenault added. “We went from proprietary to open,” and it’s easier and faster to innovate at the software level. “Software becomes where innovation takes place and where advancement capability is.”

“A lot of customers want to be able to abstract the particular hardware,” Kenniston said. To some degree sell capability, you have to provide the customer with a complete solution.

With Storewize, “you see the services pulled out of devices and making them more open,” he explained. By comparison, “when Storewize came into the market, you saw proprietary code embedded into the appliance, there was no way to really extract that. The only way to get that service, you had to buy the appliance.” The issue was how do put that software onto a platform and put it on top of a standard system, then port the technology onto different platforms that run this openness.

Open vs. proprietary

Commenting on open vs. proprietary, Arsenault pointed out that “no single vendor is in the position to provide everything the industry demands on their own.” There is not going by one such vendor able to provide “the robust set of services needed by the industry.” Collaborative approaches are needed to evolve. “We are going to see a lot of acceleration toward the more open, more industry-lead evolution.”

“It’s what the customers want, that openness, that possibility to pick the best of breed,” Kenniston agreed.  “We will acquire technology, we will continue to build technology where it makes sense, we will provide those services heterogeneously,” all depending on customer demand. “Customers want to decelerate the growth of storage in their environment,” not that of data. The real time compression technology is the best in the industry and is the solution to that issue.

“We see OpenStack gaining an early lead, there will be others that will emerge,” Arsenault said. “Vendors will continue to provide their proprietary solutions,” as they can deliver their solutions today, which can provide immediate value to their custoemrs.

Rethinking storage architecture for flash, security

Commenting on data protection trends, Kenniston said that currently the service level is directly linked to a protection model in storage architecture. He also mentioned having asked a customer which was most expensive thing to do in the data center. He expected the answer to be moving data, but the customer said data protection (which ultimately is moving data). It’s very, very expensive to do that and a big challenge is how to alleviate that.

“I think flash is not a bad headline, we’re going to see and accelerating adoption of flash. We’re already seeing rapid uptake into the marketplace,” Arsenault said. The main reason is flash making economic sense, and opening up a lot of interesting opportunities, on top of the already proven speed and high performance.