Datamation content and product recommendations are
editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links
to our partners.
Learn More
This week IBM announced IBM Spectrum Storage, targeting both software defined storage (SDS) and the hybrid cloud, and moving them back to center stage with their storage initiatives.
Interestingly, I worked on the software side of storage at IBM decades ago during far harder times. Seeing this group pull together to create something very powerful gives me some personal pleasure as a result. Let’s explore that this week.
Pulling it Together
One of the problems with IBM’s software storage offerings in the past was that they were distributed in various groups across the company. 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.
The announcement of IBM Spectrum Storage effectively ends this problem, bringing not only most of IBM’s software storage assets under a single brand and process but also uniting most of the distributed development groups. IBM now has a cohesive team, which will allow them to approach the market more like a storage pure play company.
Flash
Earlier this week, I had a chance to talk with City of Hope, which had implemented IBM FlashSystem Storage and reported almost unbelievable performance for an equally unbelievable cost. This was a mixed account that looked at a cross section of the alternatives and concluded that, for the price, nothing else was even close. Certainly, it is a powerful endorsement from a health care provider with massive data capacity and performance requirements.
If flash is the future, and I’m one of the folks who believes it is, then it appears that IBM plans to provide the highest value flash storage systems in the segment. In effect, their goal is to create products that provide so much for the money that customers won’t even consider anyone else.
Value Play
To make a value play, they clearly can’t go with a forklift strategy, forcing customers to replace all they have in order to make use of their technology. 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.
This means a lot of the work has gone into making this family of products very easy to order and install in existing plants. A lot of the innovation has gone into making the related problems go away. Having worked on projects like this while at IBM myself, I can tell you this is neither trivial nor easy, making their progress particularly impressive.
This gives IBM an offering that incrementally provides value while minimizing the cost of the deployment to the near absolute minimum necessary for any third party vendor to dovetail on an existing datacenter. This is particularly important for hybrid cloud solutions where interoperability is critical.
Redundancy
In my conversation with the City of Hope, they mentioned that because the IBM FlashSystem was itself highly redundant, they didn’t feel they needed additional redundancy. So far, that has resulted in both their ability to meet their very aggressive SLAs and keep the overall cost of the deployment to a minimum.
Building redundancy into a product is hardly new for IBM as it was an historic advantage of later mainframe designs, but it is rare enough in these new storage systems that it is very unusual to see one with a single point of failure that can perform as the City of Hope’s system does.
This once again shows the result of IBM’s laser-like focus on providing the best value in the market because additional redundancy can significantly up the cost of a related deployment.
IBM Has Come to Play
With the announcement of IBM Spectrum Storage, the firm is looking more like it did when it once dominated the industry. Using a value based strategy, they are already providing solutions like IBM FlashSystem Storage that are more than competitive against their peers. This feels like the old IBM I once knew, and, I expect, a lot of old IBM employees are feeling just a tad proud this week.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
-
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
-
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
-
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
-
Top 10 AIOps Companies
FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
-
What is Text Analysis?
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
-
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
-
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
-
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
-
Top 10 Chatbot Platforms
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
-
Finding a Career Path in AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
-
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
-
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
-
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
-
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
-
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
-
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
-
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
-
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020
-
Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 05, 2020
-
The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
August 14, 2020
SEE ALL
ARTICLES