This week, IBM announced the launch of IBM Spectrum Storage, targeted at both software-defined storage (SDS) and the hybrid cloud, in the process once again pushing its storage initiatives back under the spotlight.

Major storage vendors and startups alike have been busy pushing software-defined systems that span anything from a single array to entire enterprises. Now, IBM has gatecrashed the party, offering its traditional storage systems in a software form so customers can choose to buy them as appliance, software or service.

IBM sees Spectrum Storage as a software layer that can be deployed atop of arrays and other systems, including platforms from third-party vendors. The software will span both cloud resources and on-premise data centers, moving bits inside that infrastructure to maximize performance and minimize storage costs. But will it be enough to reinvigorate its struggling storage business?

Losing its mojo

There’s no doubt Spectrum Storage is a bold move from a legacy giant that’s never really been able to recover its mojo in the storage arena after it pulled back on R&D a decade ago to focus more on servers and other areas, said Wikibon’s Co-founder and principal analyst Dave Vellante.

“For years IBM relied on OEM deals with companies like Netapp and LSI,” Vellante said. “This hollowed out the innovation culture within IBM storage, opened the door for NetApp, EMC and various startups, and IBM storage never recovered.”

IBM’s mainstream storage business has suffered from a lack of momentum for several years now, the analyst said. It’s one shining R&D star was the SAN Volume Controller, or SVC, but even though that’s been pretty successful, it hasn’t been enough to move IBM’s storage business forward. To try and turn things around, IBM made a number of acquisitions, including XIV and smaller add-ons like Storwize and Texas Memory Systems, which when combined with SVC gives it a very high performance flash product with a full stack, said Vellante. But despite these moves, IBM failed to gain any real momentum.

“It’s pace of getting products to market was just way too slow. As such IBM continued to lose market share,” Vellante said.

It’s an assessment that Rob Enderle, chief analyst at the Enderle Group, agrees with. The analyst said that one of the biggest problems with IBM’s software storage offerings is that they’ve always been distributed across various groups within the company, and its been a significant contributing factor to its storage decline. “The collapse of the storage division and subsequent technology acquisitions resulted in fragmentation which created a lot of confusion both outside and inside the firm,” wrote Enderle in Datamation.

With the creation of IBM Spectrum Storage, Enderle believes Big Blue has put an end to this fragmentation, uniting not just its software storage assets but also its various development groups into a cohesive team that’s ready to tackle the realities of an era where everything will be software-defined.

IBM’s value play

IBM’s team is now effectively trying to leapfrog the competition by getting its software-defined storage approach to market first, Vellante said. The Wikibon analyst said the company is ideally positioned to do so thanks to the capabilities of its leader Jamie Thomas, General Manager of Storage and Software Defined Systems, who previously ran Tivoli.

“She knows software and is in a good position to leverage software assets inside of IBM,” Vellante said.

But IBM has a big problem – it’s not the only one moving in this direction, because all of the major storage players are heading that way too. The reality is we’ll see less hardware being sold as companies instead look to squeeze more efficiency out of how data is stored, and the likes of EMC, Hitachi and NetApp are all evolving to meet this new demand, and even Cisco and VMware might also get into the game. It’s a cut-throat market out there and IBM will be hard pressed to stay at the front of it.

One thing that might help IBM’s cause – Spectrum Storage seems to be relatively simple for organizations to plug in and play. The company will never be able to force customers to replace their existing architecture just to make use of the technology, and so IBM has put a lot of effort into making sure they don’t need to.

“Their secret sauce is tuning the software defined storage system for heterogeneous environments so that adding IBM Spectrum Storage components to an existing solution with servers, networking, and even other storage components from other vendors is as painless as they can make it,” said Enderle of the Enderle Group.

Whether that will be enough remains to be seen. For Wikibon’s Vellante, the key to IBM’s storage future will be its ability to invest in R&D and get substantive products in the market fast and continuously, and that’s not something its been particularly good for a long, long time.

“This has been IBM’s storage Achilles heel for decades. It needs to pick up the pace of innovation,” Vellante said.

IBM’s big advantage is it seems to be much better at software than it is at hardware these days, said Vellante. More importantly, it has set aside a significant war chest to ensure it can keep up with the pace of innovation it needs – some $1 billion over the next five years that’ll be spent on its software-defined storage efforts. But will it be enough?

“That’s $200m a year and while it sounds like a lot, the devil is in the details. It’s a bit unclear exactly where that money will be spent,” Vellante said. “If it’s on innovation and IBM invests in the go to market and marketing require to compete on top of that, then it has a good chance of turning its business around.”

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