There’s plenty of buzz around the storage portfolio, particularly how storage technology can lower costs, improve performance, and provide higher-quality services to business. That’s where IBM storage technology comes into play. IBM’s Storage Portfolio Strategist Randy Arseneau and VP of storage portfolio Ed Walsh talk to Wikibon’s Chief Analyst Dave Vellante about IBM’s commitment to storage technology, their culture and vision.

Arseneau started the conversation with IMB’s future commitment to storage technology business unit in response to Vellante’s question.  Arseneau said IBM’s storage portfolio was not on track for several years, but after the acquisition of Essex and leveraging their products range to broader audience, IBM is now in a good position to see storage as important investment and strategic platform (see the full video interview here).

Arseneau sees the company’s larger vision as a way to provide storage solutions based on built-in expertise, integration by design and simplified experience.  IBM was pioneered in virtualization, thin provisioning, and automated threading technology. Arseneau wants to build a customer centric storage platform that will have proven experience of IBM technologies along with availability, storage density, and upgradeability to meet today’s demanding and growing IT needs. The company wants to deliver storage solutions for environments of all types and sizes.

Ed Walsh, VP of storage portfolio, talked about IBM culture and how it helps to build a people-centric and product-centric company. IBM working culture supported him to implement overall product portfolio strategy of storage platform.

Further into the interview, Walsh talked about IBM’s research ethos that permeates the company’s culture and ultimately impacts the storage portfolio (see clip here).

He then emphasized IBM’s real time compression technology, which enables optimization of more data online, and helps gain additional efficiencies throughout the data life-cycle. Other companies like EMC also implement real time compression technology, but IBM’s solution significantly lower storage capital and operating expenses by reducing the amount of data that is stored, powered and cooled.

The compression technology reduces overall CPU resource usage, and results in more bandwidth for work getting done in a given timeframe.