IBM lasered its storage focus on three key areas, all heavily discussed at IBM Edge2015: flash, including all-flash and hybrid arrays; software defined; and integrated infrastructure.

IBM’s software-defined Spectrum Storage line offers six major components: Spectrum Protect, Spectrum Archive, Spectrum Control; Spectrum Virtualize; Spectrum Scale; and Spectrum Accelerate. The Spectrum Storage portfolio can centrally manage more than 300 different storage devices and yottabytes of data, according to the company.

‘Have it your way’

Eric Herzog, IBM’s VP of Marketing for Storage Systems and Software Defined, said the company is considering offering a Spectrum suite. For now, it sells the products individually. To steal a Burger King slogan, Herzog said one of IBM’s Spectrum philosophies is “have it your way.”

“We have cloud deployment models. If you’d like to use our software with someone else’s hardware, you can do that,” he said. “We are demoing a service with Iron Mountain that will allow you to have IBM storage, or other storage, sitting in your shop, and the service will archive and do multiple tiers across a Cloud and end up in an Iron Mountain vault on giant tape libraries. So you can have everything from hot data, medium data, to cold data, all consumed as a service, but combined with on-premise storage.”

Herzog said that IBM’s use of raw flash sets it apart from other vendors that use SSD.

“We can deliver under 100-microsecond performance,” he said. “We’ve integrated enterprise class data service. We’ve integrated real-time compression. We can deliver an all flash array solution for Tier 1 storage for as low as two dollars a gig. We are pushing flash out of the Tier Zero niche for high performance only and making it the standard storage medium for Tier 1 as well as Tier Zero, which opens a whole raft of opportunity.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge 2015.