UPDATED 18:00 EDT / MAY 19 2015

IBM played the open, high performance cards at Edge #IBMEdge

IBM_Edge_2015IBM put all its hardware and middleware on display this year at its fourth annual Edge conference. Originally a storage show, this year it h\was expanded to cover the new System z13 mainframe and Power8 servers and associated software. Overall it made a strong showing, parading users across the main stage and putting them on theCUBE to talk about how IBM’s high performance hardware solves their problems.

Recordings of the interviews from two days of wall-to-wall coverage of IBM Edge on #theCUBE with Wikibon Co-Founder and Chief Analyst David Vellante, Principal Research Contributor Stu Miniman, and Cofounder and CTO David Floyer, and SiliconAngle Founder and President John Furrier, are available here.

IBM touted the high performance of the z13 And Power8 servers and their market success. Gartner, for instance, just released a report listing IBM as the leader in total volume of flash storage sold in 2014, with more petabytes and SSAs sold than any other vendor. IBM z13 mainframe and Power 8 server sales also had a strong showing in IBM’s first quarter 2015 financial report.

Vellante said he initially had not expected much from the Power8 server line, back when IBM announced the sale of its x86 lines to Lenovo a year ago. “What I missed was the amount of the desire in the market for an alternative to Intel,” he said during an interview with Hurwitz Associates Founder and CEO Judith Hurwitz. The success of the OpenPower Foundation, chaired by Google, which now has more than 125 members, also played a major role in that success, they agreed.

The Foundation has turned the conversation in the marketplace around, Hurwitz said. Before OpenPower, users saw Intel as the more open player and questioned whether IBM could continue to invest heavily enough in the Power chip to keep up. Now, “OpenPower has turned that argument on its head,” she said. Power8 is the open platform, with 125 companies contributing to its development.

Miniman said IBM has become a leader in the open source movement in general and that he expects major participation from IBM at this week’s OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, which is being covered by theCUBE.

The z13

IBM Launches z13 Mainframe -- Most Powerful and Secure System Ever BuiltThe new z13 mainframe (left), announced in January, has expanded System z’s horizons beyond just being the largest scale online transaction processing (OLTP) platform to combine transaction processing with in-depth analysis on the production database. The combination of the IBM all-flash storage array, flash on the memory bus and the high-performance Power8 processor allows business analysts to work with the full transactional data set including the latest transactions. This is what David Floyer has been predicting once all-flash storage is moved physically close enough to the processor in the Flash as Memory Extension (FaME) architecture.  Floyer came away from the conference saying that the z13 is now the leading platform for Big Data analysis.

It also has a strong reputation for dependability. Miniman said that System z users he talked to at the show say they never have unplanned downtime with the mainframe.

Software

The conference also reflected IBM’s most recent reorganization in that it included software. For instance, IBM General Manager for Middleware Marie Wieck was among the IBM executives interviewed on theCUBE. And Jamie Thomas, IBM general manager for storage and software-defined technology, discussed IBM’s push toward the software-defined data center.

Hurwitz, who focuses on software and has just published a book on Cognitive Computing including IBM’s Watson, said she thinks IBM CEO Ginni Rometty “has got it right” in combining middleware with the hardware it runs on in the reorganization. “Hardware isn’t what it used to be,” she said. “Where does the hardware end and software begin?”

“IBM, HP. EMC, Oracle, Cisco all have to stabilize their core client business and get the new stuff pumping to become a growth engine,” Vellante said in the final wrap-up of the two days of coverage. The prospect for IBM hardware looks good. The z13 is “just kicking in” with strong growth already – 130% year-to-year for the first quarter – and that growth should carry through into 2016 given the long cycle times of mainframe markets.

Clients are reporting massive amounts of data that require high performance computing, Miniman said. Dr. Steven Pratt, Centerpoint Energy CTO, for instance, talked on theCUBE about how its smart meters and other systems are generating a terabyte of data a day. In medicine, genomics, which is increasingly important in treatment of cancer and other diseases, can generate a terabyte of data per patient. IBM Fellow with IBM Research Donna Dillenberger talked about giving some genomics researchers from an IBM client access to a virtual machine on her z13. Later they said their analysis ran faster on her system than it did on a Cray supercomputer.  This all plays strongly into IBM’s message of high performance systems for commercial production.

“We like to say that you have to shrink to grow,” Vellante said. “IBM certainly got the shrinking done” with the big layoffs in January. Now it is time for it to start showing the growth.


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