Last month IBM hosted the EDGE 2013 conference in Las Vegas. Co-founder of SiliconANGLE, John Furrier and Dave Vellante of Wikibon sat down for a candid conversation with Ambuj Goyal, general manager of storage and networking for IBM. The three discussed the history of storage, its current iteration within a data management architecture and the future relationship storage will have with the enterprise.

Goyal set the tone of the conversation right from the start commenting, “I think about ‘storage’ as an archaic term. Storage has to be part of a data management architecture. Storage is an element.” He made it clear his discussion of storage was to focus on its role once the actual term is gone from the industry.

For too many clients, a conversation about storage focuses on its cost. Most often the question asked has to do with how many dollars buy how many gigabytes. The future of the industry is going to shift to a focus on the cost of data management and furthermore how we should approach the task of data management for a specific organization.

As Goyal points out, each organization utilizes different data sets for different purposes. And not all data is created equal. “It is about the economy of data, not dollars per square inch.” This will be more and more true as individual organizations begin folding the analysis of metadata into their operational plans. Of course, metadata is growing faster than the data itself. Goyal predicts we will soon see ‘metadata metadata’.

The historical model for storage required companies, like IBM, to create an organizationally specific hardware. “There is so much inefficiency in the industry because we have created separate boxes for every API and every media.” The future of the industry is going to see a massive shift where storage will be viewed as a platform.

IBM calls their direction the ‘3^rd generation storewise platform’. As Goyal says, “I would rather see a software layer associated with it all…open standards-based and based on the requirements of the application or the business-use case scenario.”

IBMs 3^rd generation is a software defined storage which can have either IBM or non-IBM storage run underneath. IBMs partners would be able to extend it with file, object, analytic, replication, copy data management, etc. “Our 3^rd generation is all about…you cannot manage all the data on your own. You cannot even understand metadata. Policy based data management has come to an end.”

Another component of IBMs 3^rd generation is the addition of code analytics so it will be self-understanding in terms of what data is coming in. The system itself will generate valuable metadata that will be able to be learned and leveraged by applications and the information garnered will drive the hardware underneath.

IBM has been one of the drivers of the early traditional storage industry. By recognizing a reformation within the industry, IBM and other organizations are presented with an opportunity to shift the game.