Introduction
IBM Edge 2013 was extremely well represented this year with IBM Edge 2013 end-to-end coverage from theCUBE. Analysts from Wikibon and SiliconAngle.com met with dozens of people over a multiday period to assess and reassess the current state of technology as told through IBM’s view of the industry. CIOs, have a multitude of challenges and opportunities to consider from the various discussions that took place during the event.
Multimedia Coverage from theCube and SiliconANGLE.com' Original Content: SiliconANGLE and Wikibon filmed two days of live video at IBM Edge 2013 in Las Vegas, June 10th and 11th, 2013. Also see videos from this show on SiliconAngle's YouTube playlist
Flash is increasingly important in modern data centers
Although flash is hardly a brand new storage technology, it’s taken quite some time for vendors to figure out how to best leverage it to maximum effectiveness in the data center. As a result, today’s CIOs are afforded much more solution choice that has been seen in the past. While a welcome entrant in the burgeoning flash-based storage market, IBM’s new products aren’t exactly revolutionary. Other vendors – both those well-established and newer startups – have been experimenting with techniques to use flash in many ways. Today, CIOs enjoy the ability to purchase all-flash storage arrays, hybrid storage arrays that use flash as an accelerator, and server side flash that uses PCI-e server slots to bring the benefits of flash right into the server.
IBM is jumping on the flash bandwagon in a very big way. For the market, the more players that are in the flash space, the better. The quicker that flash supplants traditional data center storage, the sooner that storage becomes, for all intents and purposes, a non-consideration in many ways. Think of it this way: For years, organizations have had to worry about the ability of their rotational storage to meet the workload demands of the business. Today, flash storage can be easily applied to just about any workload to completely address this issue. Further, as flash drives grow in size and as more vendors use flash to accelerate capacity-rich rotational storage, the less time CIOs and their staff members will have to spend designed complicated storage environments.
There is some precedence for a resource becoming so overwhelmingly powerful that it is all but forgotten. As Intel continued to cram an ever-increasing number of processing cores into its processors, so much additional processing power was added to the virtual environment that it’s hardly even considered a finite resource these days. As more and more flash is added to the data center, we may see a similar trend take place wherein storage “just works” to support the business. In fact, IBM’s Vice President of Storage, Laura Guio, believes that storage is becoming obsolete in that storage will become so deeply entrenched in the data center that it will become just another resource that makes the business work.
Right now, based on IBM’s flash news at IBM Edge, there isn’t anything that CIOs need to necessarily jump on right away. However, CIOs should take note of the new hardware and services that IBM brings to the market, as well as the company’s competence in building solutions around its products. Further, CIOs should see IBM’s flash push as a serious validation of that technology and begin considering whether or not flash storage might meet internal business use cases.
The cloud is approaching Earth
In another move that isn’t necessary revolutionary, but does provide additional legitimacy to the market and new options for CIOs, IBM made a splash with its $2 billion purchase of SoftLayer, an Amazon Web Services competitor. Although SoftLayer is built on Apache’s CloudStack, IBM intends to bring full OpenStack compatibility to the service.
This acquisition, when coupled with IBM’s expansion plans, gives the company a service that should be able to compete with pretty much anything out there, including Amazon. As is almost always the case, new competition from a company with IBM’s stature is good for the market, as it provides customers with new options. This is a new opportunity and new leverage but may come with a challenge for SMB and small midmarket CIOs. While SoftLayer itself courted many small and medium businesses, IBM’s SoftLayer-provided services are intended to target larger customers. This is not to say that small and medium business will be left out of the game, but IBM’s priorities for SMB and midmarket will become clear as users begin to experience SoftLayer under new management.
For CIOs, there are different recommendations based in market size. For enterprises, SoftLayer should be on your short list for public cloud needs. The technology is excellent, and IBM has indicated that large enterprises will benefit from the transaction. For small and medium sized CIOs, take a wait and see approach to see how IBM handles this space. Unfortunately, many acquisitions result in the service’s original market becoming marginalized by the need for the acquirer to quickly recoup its transaction costs.
Action Item: It’s clear that flash and cloud are well beyond the hype phase and that real markets are emerging in ways that CIOs can begin to more easily grasp with much less risk than in the past. For CIOs who haven’t done so in a while, new trends – primarily flash and cloud – mean that the time is ripe for a comprehensive architectural assessment of your data center with an eye toward the creation of a long-term road map that informs overall technology-buying decisions. As a part of this roadmap, consider whether emerging classes of service can help solve business-critical IT challenges while also helping the CIO reduce spend and refocus technical IT staff to other needs.
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