IBM announced some major steps in both flash and cloud services at the recent IBM Edge 2013 conference in Las Vegas, writes Wikibon Analyst, Consultant, and former CIO Scott Lowe in his Wikibon Alert, “What IBM Edge, Cloud and Flash Mean to the CIO”. While IBM is not pioneering new approaches or technologies in flash, its announcements at Edge greatly expand the presence of flash in its product line. IBM has included flash in its PureSystems and other products for some time. Now it is setting a direction toward a line of all -flash storage products. This both expands its presence in the flash market and provides a strong endorsement for use of flash in mission-critical systems.

As flash replaces spinning rust, Lowe says, the effect will be to make flash invisible to IT staff. Instead of devising complex strategies to milk the last possible bit of performance out of slow spinning disk arrays to meet business needs, they can just presume that flash storage will work at whatever performance level is needed. Overall IBM’s greatly increased commitment to flash storage is good news for CIOs, therefore.

IBM’s cloud news was dominated by its $2 billion purchase of SoftLayer, an AWS competitor that had a focus on SMBs. Lowe says CIOs can expect IBM to refocus SoftLayer on a higher-end market. While it won’t completely forget SoftLayer’s small company clients, they may feel a little neglected.

This, he says, is a good time for CIOs to connect a comprehensive architectural assessment of their data centers and create a long-term roadmap that can inform all technology-buying decisions. As part of that, they should determine whether emerging classes of service can solve business problems while reducing spend and refocusing technical IT staff on other needs.

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