UPDATED 16:45 EDT / SEPTEMBER 19 2016

NEWS

IBM’s ‘flexibility play’ with storage solutions | #IBMEdge

As containers gain more prominence in the world of storage, their roles in and out of the cloud connectivity landscape are gaining more distinction in their utility, as well as the ways in which vendors can best work to meet customers’ container needs.

Eric Herzog, VP of Product Marketing and Management of Storage Systems and Software-Defined Infrastructure at IBM, joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during IBM Edge 2016 to talk about what his team is doing to prepare for the future, how the Dell-EMC merger is shaping the market, and what the international forecast looks like.

Compatibility for customers

After some discussion of past event trends, including VMware’s VMworld conference, Herzog addressed IBM’s dedication to flexibility. “From our perspective, we’re working with any hypervisor,” he said. “However they want to put the applications … we want to make sure that our customers are always taken care of, from that perspective.”

While there was some speculation amongst the hosts and Herzog as to how the Dell-EMC events might play out, Herzog placed emphasis on that support for customers, regardless of the merger’s circumstances. “A good storage vendor wants to make sure that whatever type of virtualization layer … the customer chooses, [it’s supported]. … We wanna make sure that our customers are taken care of,” he said.

Data safety and the container stall

Another point of discussion touched on the need for securing and maintaining data integrity, as its use in management, visualization, backup and various other growing fields has no slowing in sight.

“Obviously, the storage vendors have all worked with VMware to make sure that [data is safe],” Herzog shared. “The hardware guys are going to go through the same thing. … From a storage perspective, you want to make sure that data [stays safe in transfers].”

He continued: “We’re already working with some container vendors. You do need to be in that [container market] space, and we’re in that space in a big way as a company.”

He also gave some of his thoughts on the adoption of containers by a wide spread of businesses, though he felt that, for whatever reason, they had not yet reached their full potential. “When virtualization came out, it really did sweep the market quickly. Containers have been around for a while now, and [that hasn’t happened yet].”

Products and competitors

“This year, for us, has seen an amazing amount of product launches,” Herzog said, highlighting the Spectrum Storage line of services offering solutions in computing, storage, backup, data management and more. “There’s a lot, and there’s more coming. … A lot of the value out of our arrays [is in the Spectrum lines],” he said.

Herzog was also able to offer some IBM perspective on how China would influence future markets. Currently, Herzog sees China as “a good market,” with sales doing well consistently, but he questioned what they might end up doing with storage, with possibilities of buying an existing company or creating their own being the prime anticipations. Whichever way it goes, he said, “The Chinese always end up being a force long-term.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU