With a one billion dollar investment in software defined storage, “we’re really serious about this agenda,” said the IBM Corporation’s GM of Storage and Software Defined, Jamie Thomas, in a live interview with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante during IBM’s InterConnect event. “This is an important endeavors for us,” she added, “and part of our overall cloud strategy.”

As part of their renewed focus on storage, Thomas explained that IBM made “important organizational changes” in which it “brought together the storage capabilities from hardware and software.” Now, she said, storage functions as an “integrated unit and integrated sales force.”

New Product Offerings

“Tectonic shifts,” Thomas contended, “have driven storage in a new direction.” And IBM had to adopt agile tactics and develop new products in order to ensure their clients could reap the benefits of storage innovation.

IBM’s newest software defined storage product is IBM Spectrum Storage. It enables clients to “manage heterogeneous storage environments and optimize infrastructure for the future,” said Thomas. IBM Spectrum Storage, she continued, has “three main capacities” made possible by IBM’s decision to “unleash the software from the hardware-based appliance.” These capacities include:
1. Virtualization: Which helps to improve efficiency and utilization.
2. Spectrum Scale: Which enables clients to support big data and analytics environments.
3. Accelerate: A cloud based storage feature consisting of extracted software intelligence from XIV Appliance. The abstracted software layer allows clients to deploy IBM’s Spectrum Accelerate “in a matter of minutes,” said Thomas. And it means they can make use of almost any commodity based hardware that they client may already have.

Pricing Model

“Cloud-based pricing,” said Thomas, is available in a terabyte based pricing model. This pay-as-you go model allows clients to, according to Thomas, “ascertain what they need.” Then, on a monthly basis, they can purchase the necessary storage. Thomas said she believes that this plan “enables a lot more flexibility.” Flexibility is essential to overall quality, she explained, because “many of our clients don’t exactly know they model they’ll use” or even “where the data will reside.” The pay-as-you go model works especially well with IBM Spectrum Storage, Thomas said, because it enables clients to use their own hardware.

“The approach we took,” commented Thomas, “is about the ability to ingest the data wherever it resides.” Most importantly, IBM’s approach offers “the ability to extract intelligence from this data without moving it around,” which, Thomas asserted, “takes up too much network bandwidth.”

What to Expect from IBM Storage in 2015 and Beyond

In the future, Thomas said, IBM’s focus will be on “working with [its] clients to make sure they get value” by enabling clients “across many industries to get enormous benefits from cost savings and business performance.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect.