UPDATED 18:04 EDT / JUNE 10 2013

NEWS

“Strategy without execution is a hallucination,” says IBM’s Ambuj Goyal #IBMEdge

Ambuj Goyal, GM System Storage & Networking, who has recently joined the IBM team, discussed software-defined storage developments and data management with theCube co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at the IBM Edge 2013 conference in Las Vegas.

“I think about storage as an archaic term because you throw stuff in it and you don’t remember it,” Goyal said. This creates a big data management problem. “Storage has to be part of the data management architecture. Storage is an element of an overall data management architecture,” so the term will disappear from the industry and people will focus on data, he explained.

The economics of data + storage

 

Commoditization has been going on for the past 50 years, Goyal said.  The question is what is the value, how is data being used?  “Different data will have different value, data has different economics. It is about economics of data, not dollars per storage.”

Asked to commend on the role of metadata, Goyal said “metadata itself is going faster than the data itself, then you will have metadata metadata. It’s about understanding what you have, what’s your economics and how to manage it.”

“The economics of storage was so different from what it is now,” Goyal stated. Flash, tape, disc is not a business, companies are in “the business in managing data.”  Commenting on the problem of a different box for a different thing, Goyal said he’d rather see a software layer, all open, standards based. “It’s not based on the box, it’s based on the applications.”

  • Bringing applications to the data

“We think that eventually applications define how they want to access the data. We can’t really create a separate system in the box based on the APIs that access data,” Goyal explained. That is why IBM focuses on creating a software defined storage and “extend it with file, object, analytics, replication, copy data management, everything.” That is the model of the future. “There is so much inefficiency in the industry because we’ve created separate boxes for every API and application.”

“For us, the first software-defined storage was about virtualization. The second one is extending the platform with open – OpenStack, open APIs, objects, so that any company can write capabilities on it,” Goyal said. The third is all about adding core analytics inside to create valuable metadata. “Policy-based data management has come to an end.”

“Every time an industry reforms, you have an opportunity to shift the game.”

 

Asked to comment on a quote attributed to him, “flash is the solution for poorly written software,” Goyal explained it was actually a quote of an IBM customer. It was generated by the company’s experience with working on optimizing the ERP solutions. The company chose flash storage, the system was up and running in 4 hours and reported significant improvement in speed and performance. The software in question was not written for the IT reality it was used in, which had previously created glitches.

“This whole traditional storage industry has been stable for decades,” Goyal said. If changes were not coming in, then the battle in this particular industry would be about losing and gaming this or that client. “Every time an industry reforms, you have an opportunity to shift the game. You can be resisting change or be at the front end.”

The second tipping point in the storage industry is that commoditizing is accelerating and open is gaining ground, Goyal said. Creating software-defined storage and making it independent of IBM hardware changes the game.

“OpenStack, OpenDaylight and new standards coming in allow people to access data in different ways.” Goyal predicted that an elastic software layer will manage data access. “Our play is to be the leader in both tipping points. When you do that, you change the game for us and our clients.”

Open and collaboration, that’s the new standard. “Leveraging the open standards is not about control, it’s about execution. We will continue to invest around software defined storage to deliver value to clients.”

“Any strategy, without execution, is no good. Strategy without execution is a hallucination. We need to execute in the market, with our clients and partners, not inside IBM, to make sure we can deliver end to end value to clients. This will keep me awake at night forever,” Ambuj Goyal said.


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