Posts Tagged IBM
Infrastructure Wars: The Battle Brewing in the Storage Industry
Posted by David Vellante in Storage, Wikibon on February 10th, 2010
How Google, Microsoft and Oracle are Driving Competition in the Storage Industry
Application Stack vs Array
What you Need to Know
There is a competitive battle brewing in the on-premise storage business and it’s not between EMC/NetApp or EMC/IBM. It’s stemming from a move by independent software vendors specifically Microsoft and Oracle, to bundle more storage function into their application stacks, push storage function closer to the host and commoditize the storage hardware layer. The move to integrate storage function into the application stack is real and in some cases can add substantial value to organizations. But there is a price to pay and IT executives need to understand the strategies and implications for long term success. Underpinning these trends is Google’s decade long march toward simplification and cloud services; which is not only driving software vendors like Microsoft crazy; it’s also causing them to drive down perceived costs wherever possible and grab as much value in their stacks as they can.
Here’s the bottom line. IT execs have three choices:
Emulex Helps Data Protection and Privacy Through Encryption
Posted by Dennis Martin in Wikibon on November 13th, 2009
Emulex’s strategic direction is to help IT shops provide additional data protection and privacy by encrypting data at the source – in the host server. There has been plenty of news about data breaches and literally millions of data records at risk, and some of the laws requiring public disclosure of data breaches. More recently, some states within the USA have passed laws requiring encryption for transmission or storage of personally identifiable information outside of a secure system. CIOs can no longer debate about whether to encrypt. Encryption is no longer an option, but a requirement.
8 Reasons to Pay Attention to XIV
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on November 11th, 2009
Look Out World...Here Comes XIV!
IBM yesterday announced a number of enhancements to its XIV storage platform. You can read about what IBM announced in some detail here from Chris Mellor and here from Tony Pearson.
When IBM announced its acquisition of XIV in late 2007, the Wikibon Peer Incite Meeting on the topic was one of the most well-attended at that point in our history. The reasons were simple:
- XIV is Moshe’s company; and Moshe is a God in the storage business;
- IBM is a potential sleeping giant in storage.
Time to Re-think Disk-based Backup
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on October 7th, 2009
Time to Re-think Backup?
Last week I wrote “From a backup perspective, the world is at an inflection point. Today’s requirements for growth, rapid data access and speedy recovery are outstripping the industry’s ability to solve backup challenges.” I’d like to explore this a bit further.
The basic premise of this post is that while storing data on disk in de-duplicated format is more cost effective than storing non-de-duplicated data, there is very little other advantage, in the backup process to just changing the target where data is stored. IT practitioners, especially those aggressively pursuing virtualization strategies, have an opportunity to re-architect backup processes and dramatically reduce I/O bottlenecks associated with backup.
FalconStor – The Other De-Dup Option
Posted by Nick Allen in Wikibon on June 3rd, 2009
On Monday, June 1st, 2009, FalconStor Software announced some pretty compelling data reduction numbers. Depending on whose numbers you believe FalconStor’s single-node performance is 20-30% faster than Data Domain’s single node performance. What’s more, in its reference environment discussed here on Wikibon and in a press release here FalconStor’s Single Instance Repository (SIR) was able to achieve a 40:1 data reduction ratio – 20:1 using SHA-1 deduplication at a block level and then 2:1 using hardware compression cards from HiFN. FalconStor also has file level data reduction using pretty much the same code.
Hanging in the Wikibon Tweet Suite at SNW Spring 2009
Posted by Dennis Martin in Wikibon on April 10th, 2009
It was another successful and busy week at Storage Networking World (SNW) Spring 2009 in Orlando. Although the number of vendors, by my count, was 48% of what it was in Spring 2008, it was apparent that the vendors who did participate sent fewer people. However, the SNW officials said that the end-user attendance was 92% of what it was in Spring 2008. Obviously travel budgets have been cut, and this was reflected in the end-user attendance, which had shifted to many local IT professionals from the central Florida region.
Hanging in the Tweet Suite @ SNW
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on April 9th, 2009
The Spring 2009 Storage Networking World ends today. It was a busy week for the Wikibon team as we were briefed by more than 25 technology companies and tweeted the live action to the Wikibon community. Bill Mottram, Dennis Martin and I gave presentations during the week, Dennis on SSD for Microsoft Apps, Bill on optimizing energy and efficiency and me with Rich Avila on how Virtualization Energizes Cal State U East Bay.
One more thought on IBM Sun
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on March 19th, 2009
After a not so great night’s sleep I awoke thinking about one more aspect of this possible deal that I haven’t seen discussed. Here’s a quick update to yesterday’s post on this topic.
In the 1980’s, my boss at IDC, turned author, David Moschella introduced what he called the “Theory of Dis-integration.” Today it looks trivial but making this call in 1987 was pretty forward thinking. What the Theory of Dis-integration said is that the next decade of IT competition would be shaped by a powerful trend, spawned by the economics of the microprocessor and IBM’s decision to outsource its PC chip and OS from Intel and Microsoft respectively. It called for the end of vertical integration in the IT business replaced by a segmented competitive structure.
Why aren’t more VMware storage arrays virtualized?
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on March 18th, 2009
Yesterday, the Wikibon community heard from Cal State U East Bay’s Rich Avila. He, like other guests on Wikibon, including BT’s Michael Crader, have cited the benefits of combining server and storage virtualization. Yet numerous customers we speak with don’t virtualize storage arrays under VMware.
Industry data from IDC and Forrester over the past few years clearly shows EMC dominates in virtualized server environments as the backend storage platform of choice. The data ranges from 40% to close to 50% market share. Clearly these EMC arrays are not sitting behind Invista so one can only assume the capacity of these arrays is not virtualized. Folks like 3PAR of course would say that this is a missed opportunity– once you try a fully virtualized platform under VMware you’ll see the advantages and won’t go back.
Today’s hot M&A rumor – IBM to aquire SUN for $6.5B!
According to the Wall Street Journal IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems Inc for at least $6.5 billion. That price tag would translate into a premium of about 100 percent over Sun’s NASDAQ closing price Tuesday of $4.97.
WSJ displayed a masterful ability to hedge their bet by saying that a deal with IBM could happen as early as this week – or fall apart! They also noted that if IBM does buy Sun, it would be the company’s largest acquisition since it bought Canadian software maker Cognos for about $5 billion in January 2008.
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