As the IT industry makes quantum leaps forward in technological advancement, in regards to software-defined storage, in some ways, the industry is moving “back to the future.”

“When I started in this business 30 years ago, we were working with a mainframe and SMS,” IT vet Jon Toigo, managing partner of Toigo Partners International, LLC, told theCUBE during IBM Edge2015. “Now, we’re going back to that model.”

An eye toward IBM’s Spectrum Storage

Toigo has his eye on IBM’s Spectrum Storage family. “IBM’s Software Defined storage is actually XIV software off the XIV array, which is now a Spectrum product,” he said. “They have Spectrum Accelerate, which I believe incorporates flash; they have spectrum Archive, Spectrum Protect … I made a quip on my blog that I’m hoping we’re integrated beyond the brochure level.”

Changes to IBM’s portfolio, from a storage perspective, also raise questions. “For all of the intelligent engineering that’s being done to migrate value-added software off the array controller and add another layer of software on the server itself, they’re ignoring, in most cases, capacity management,” saidToigo. “That functionality is staying on the array controller. That’s a huge mistake.”

Hyperconverged solutions

The consultant is also keeping his attention on hyperconverged solutions and IBM SoftLayer. “It seems to be the only area of momentum in storage right now,” Toigo said. “Flash is terribly misused by both VMware and Microsoft currently. In the case of Microsoft, when they do their deduplication process, they write it to flash and then they do the small-block fixes to the data set, and they’re hammering the flash over and over with small block writes.”

To find out where Toigo thinks Flash has potential, watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge2015.