Brian Truskowski is IBM General Manager for System Storage and Networking. I used to directly report to him in a previous role, and a few years ago he used to be the IBM CIO that helped with IBM's internal IT transformation.
Brian indicates that the previous approach to growth was to "Just Buy More", but this has some unintended consequences. He argued that companies need to adopt one or more of the following approaches to growth:
- Stop storing so much - reduce data footprint using storage efficiency capabilities like data deduplication and compression
- Store more with what is already on the floor - improve storage utilization with technologies like storage virtualization and thin provisioning
- Move data to the right place - implement automated tiering, such as "Flash & Stash" between Solid-state drives and spinning disk, and/or Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) between disk and tape. Studies at some clients have found over 70 percent of data has not beed touched in the last 90 days
This time of dramatic change is the result of a "perfect storm" of influences, including the rising costs and risks associated with losing data, the increased need to index and search data, the desire for "Business Analytics", and the expectation for 100 percent up-time. This is driving IBM to offer hyper-efficient backup, Continuous Data Availability, and Smart Archive solutions.
The case study of SPRINT is a good example. SPRINT is a Telecommunications provider for cell phone users. They were challenged with 35 percent utilization, 165 storage arrays from six different vendors, and an expected 100 percent increase in their IT maintenance costs. After implementing IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC) to manager 2.9 PB of data, SPRINT increased their utilization to 82 percent, reduced down to 70 storage arrays from only three vendors, and reduced their maintenance costs by 57 percent. Today, SPRINT now manages over 5 PB of data with SVC and TPC, have reduced their power and cooling by 3.5 million KWh, representing $320,000 USD in savings.
He covered the latest XIV Gen3 announcement, including the amazing boost in performance that I covered in detail in last week's post [IBM Announcements for July 2011 - XIV Gen 3, and more].
Roland Hagan is the IBM Vice President for the System x server platform. He talked about the "IT Conundrum" that represents a vicious cycle of "IT Sprawl", "Untrusted Data" and "Inflexible IT" that seem to feed each other. IBM is trying to change behavior, from thinking and dealing with physical boxes representing servers, storage and network gear, to a more holistic view focused on workloads, shared resource pools, independent scaling, and automated management.
IBM is leading the server marketplace, in part because of clever things IBM is doing, especially in developing the eX5 chipset that surrounds x86 commondity processors, and in part because of actions or decisions the competition have taken:
- It doesn't break IBM's heart that Oracle decided to drop software support of their database on Itanium, which focued entirley against HP. Oracle runs on IBM servers better than Oracle/Sun or HP servers today, so it does not impact us, other than IBM has had a lot of people leaving HP to switch over to IBM.
- HP has taken on a new CEO and reduced their R&D budget, causing them to be late-to-market on some of their offerings.
- Dell continues to focus on the small and medium sized customer, and have not really broken into the "Enterprise".
- Newcomer Cisco has some great technology that only seems to be adoptable in "Green Field" situations, as it does not integrate well with existing data center infrastructures.
The combination of ex5 chip-set architecture, Max5 memory expansion capabilities and Virtual Network Interface Cards (NICs), provide for a very VM-aware platform. For those who are not ready to fully adopt an integrated stack like IBM CloudBurst, IBM offers the Tivoli Service Automation software on its own, and a new [IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud] as stepping stones to get there.