This week, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE is at IBM Edge in Las Vegas. In this interview, Laura Guio, VP & Business Line Executive of STG at IBM, talked to John Furrier and Dave Vellante about IBM’s “infrastructure matters” initiative, their work with Lenovo and how tape and flash can keep costs down.

Infrastructure Matters

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Furrier started the interview by asking Guio to talk about their ‘infrastructure matters’ initiative and how that ties into changes IBM is rolling out for customers. Guio explained that it’s about giving customers the ability to take advantage of IBM’s storage technology and utilize it in a software lay down fashion, allowing them the freedom to choose the hardware they want to use.

Guio said customers appreciate IBM not defining the hardware options available to them. Vellante stated software-defined sounds good, but asked if there were any customer concerns around whether this will run as well as what they currently have. She clarified customers won’t be boxed in to only being able to move forward with software-defined and will still have the option to use the appliance approach. What customers have today is going to fit into a software-defined strategy. Over time, the software function will get more robust.

C-suite executives are excited about this new approach, but engineering teams are a little weary because they’re concerned about their data center getting disrupted. To resolve this, Guio said they’re making sure the design points getting put in are satisfying the direction c-suites are taking while not disrupting the business they’re running.

• Software disruption

With all the software disruptions going on, Vellante questioned Laura about IBM’s approach towards them. Guio said their “approach is to drive the leading-edge technology as it comes out without disrupting what a client has in the data center today.”

She added the worst they can do is to introduce new technology and not make it work with what clients currently have in their environment. Their objective is to offer leading technology with very little disruption.

IBM and Lenovo

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Guio admitted that there was a little trepidation as to what was going to happen with Lenovo’s x86 server business deal early on, but they’ve been able to calm those fear over time. For herself in particular, she considers it a great opportunity to work with Lenovo to reach some of the markets in their low-end portfolio that they haven’t been to reach well in the past.

Also, Guio mentioned IBM is working closely with Lenovo about what they can do from a storage perspective, specifically around the v3700 and v5000. They then plan on really going after a lot of the China market, which Lenovo has cornered.

• Marrying tape and flash to keep costs down

When Furrier asked how the cloud weaves into the story of what’s going on at IBM Edge, one interesting thread Guio noted is how tape is going to play a big role in the future of cloud. She said that clients can’t afford to keep overwhelming amounts of data online and on spinning disks. Guio brought up the idea of intersecting tape with what’s being done with flash, then figuring out how that works into a cloud environment.

“For the certain clients that are out in the industry, I think there’s a great opportunity here of marrying tape and flash and really being able to apply that to customers in keeping costs down,” Guio added.

Also, Furrier has coined the term “flape”, combing flash and tape. Will it catch on?