Ron Riffe, Storage Software Business Strategy of IBM, talks about how he strives to understand the economics of business problems and implement IBM solutions, live inside theCUBE with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman from the floor of the recently IBM Edge 2013 in Las Vegas. See the full, archived video of the broadcast below.

At the start of the conversion, Riffe briefed us on his role at IBM. As a Storage Software Business Strategy head, he is responsible for the technical and business strategy necessary to achieve revenue growth in storage software products and solutions. He interacts with an extended portfolio including Unified Recovery, Storage Virtualization, and Virtualization Management.

To answer to the question of recent market trends in storage and how IBM is best fit to capture the market trend, Riffe said for decades, data was growing but the hardware vendors are building storage system to improve aerial density a little bit more quickly than the data is growing. For IT managers and storage administrators, it means more buying of storage systems and hard disks and keeps the budget moving as data grows.

He then said the trend is slowing moving towards software defined storage (SDS) technology. For IBM SDS means, “SDS is a software layer that gives full set of storage services and is designed to run on commodity hardware and leverage commodity persistent data resources.”

Riffe said with SDS in place, IBM is finding that clients are shifting base from earlier 70 percent storage for tier one application and services to 30  percent storage, 5 percent on flash and rest are on tier two or three services.

“Software-defined layer provides all of the storage services you need from snapshot to data placement, replication, thin provisioning and compression. Everything you need to provide for the data is in that Software defined layer,” he added.

Although the SDS is relatively new phenomenon, IBM has been investing in and tuning the Storwize family software platform. Riffe said the Storwize family software platform is designed to be portable, leveraging commodity hardware engines (like Intel) for its compute needs. He added that Storwize family software platform runs not only on commodity engines but on a wide variety of internal disks, flash systems and other external storage systems.

On the provisioning side, Riffe said majority now see provisioning and management of storage as a bottleneck, which lead to storage automation being the highest ranked integration point. Provisioning needs virtual machines, storage resources and network resources to solve complex method of rapidly deployed workload.

See Riffe’s full segment below.