UPDATED 14:23 EDT / JUNE 02 2014

A sleeping storage giant awakes : Is IBM ready to take on EMC? | #IBMEdge2014

IBM Edge 2013The big questions at IBM Edge 2014 this year were, did IBM mean what it said a year ago about becoming aggressive in the storage industry, and if so, can it actually win back a significant share of the market that it once dominated and lost to EMC?

The answer to the first question is yes. IBM announced a complete refresh of its storage portfolio highlighted by a strong emphasis on software-defined storage (SDS) and flash. Highlights included its new Elastic Cloud SDS and increased flash inclusion throughout its storage portfolio. Wikibon CTO David Floyer called Elastic Cloud “ServerSAN for the data center” on theCUBE. This is a significant statement, given that Floyer has published analysis on Wikibon.org arguing that ServerSAN will replace DAS and SAN over time. Later Wikibon CEO David Vellante agreed, but cautioned that Elastic Storage today does not include all the pieces of ServerSAN.

“For at least four years we’ve been been asking if the sleeping giant, IBM, is going to wake up in storage,” said Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Stuart Miniman. It may not be fully awake yet, but it is certainly waking up.

IBM versus EMC

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The second question got a more nuanced answer at IBM Edge. Certainly, Floyer said, IBM has the best chance of taking the market away from EMC. It has the resources, global distribution and a sales force with contacts throughout the market, and staying power. And if it is going try for storage market dominance, this is the time to do it, as the disruption created by flash and SDS have loosened EMC’s grip on the market.

The startups, by comparison, have little chance to repeat EMC’s market takeover. “When that has happened is when the giants have been totally asleep,” Floyer said. That is not true today. “EMC has put a lot of effort into flash, understands it, and made a great acquisition with [flash storage startup] DSSD.”

Taking the market back will not be easy for IBM, but it is succeeding in selling its all-flash arrays into the high-end performance part of the market, particularly the financial vertical, Floyer said. Gartner was expected to release numbers putting IBM at the top of the market in flash sales for the last quarter, with EMC fourth. At the time of writing, Gartner’s numbers remain unpublished.

The problem for IBM in flash, Floyer said, is price – it is too high for the midrange, and for applications where high performance is less important than other qualities such as footprint, power consumption and consistent quality-of-service (QoS). It needs to focus on reducing the cost of its flash arrays over the next year if it is to maintain the pace of its sales.

Focused on customers, not competitors

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IBM Edge 2013IBM’s approach to the market, however, is focused on customers rather than competitors, said Jamie Thomas, the general manager of software defined systems and storage at IBM (see video embedded below).

“We’ve arrived here with a perspective on, ‘what does infrastructure mean to our clients on this new journey they embarked on?’” she said. IBM’s clients are facing a revolution in their businesses driven by cloud, analytics, mobile and social.

“We needed to address this new generation of applications and workloads that fundamentally are changing infrastructure needs,” Thomas went on. The goals were both to create new products to answer new needs and to bring existing systems in client data centers forward so that clients can gain the maximum advantage from existing investments.

“Over the last 19 months more of our clients have been capturing unstructured data around social and mobile,” Thomas explained. “They need a different way of deploying infrastructure. This capability allows them to achieve both flexibility and economics around those deployments.”

IBM’s storage strategy is based on three tenants: SDS, optimization and performance through flash innovation across the product line, and next generation virtualization “to allow clients to optimize their existing storage environment,” noted Thomas.

For instance Elastic Storage, which incorporates technology from Watson, allows customers to better manage their existing infrastructure and apply policy and data governance across the data center, not just in one array at a time. It supports more intelligent tiering across flash, spinning disk and tape “for the most effective use of the media both to meet the needs of new workloads and support back-office systems,” explained Thomas.

This runs on a new generation of storage virtualization that supports more than 260 storage systems, both IBM and non-IBM, allowing users to apply their existing storage investment to these new demands.

The role of open source

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All the storage products, including Elastic Storage, XIV and Storwize, are integrated with OpenStack Cinder and Swift. Elastic Storage is also being integrated with Hadoop. IBM has contributed more than 200,000 lines of code to OpenStack to support the infrastructure.

In flash, “clearly all-flash is an important play for us,” Thomas said, and combining flash with virtualization creates added benefit. But IBM does not see flash as a “one size fits all” answer, and it also has infused flash into its disk-based product lines such as XIV and Storwize. “Right now we see different use cases that require different offerings. But as things change and flash becomes more prevalent, our product offerings will reflect what customers need and desire.

“I think there’s an inflection point right now that benefits those of us who are in infrastructure because of the significance of data,” she detailed. “We’re the stewards of the data for many organizations. The choices that we make – IBM as a vendor & the clients that work with us – will set a foundation for the workload for years to come. I think that’s an important responsibility.”

Images courtesy IBM Corp.


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