This month I was able to attend my first TechXchange and it blew my expectations out of the water! Well, to be honest, I didn’t know what to expect, and with over 1.5k sessions and almost 9k attendees from all over the world I can only describe it as the Learning Olympics for the tech world. More importantly, it was an incredible opportunity to meet my peers and learn about innovations changing the storage landscape right now from many of IBM’s experts.

Here are some sessions around Storage and Data Resilience that stood out to me and some of my takeaways:

FlashSystem grid and Policy Based High Availability (PBHA)

• ·       Byron Grossnickle, IBM Technical Brand Specialist, demonstrated the FlashSystem grid, showcasing how simple and straightforward the deployment process is. His discussion touched on a question I had: How is the FlashSystem grid different than other IBM scale-out storage systems, like SVC?  The answer is that FlashSystem grid does not rely on I/O groups. Instead of having one big 'pool' to work from, systems in a FlashSystem grid are independent, allowing for granular management, maintenance, and migrations. So, the main difference lies in their architecture. This does not mean that users need to pick one or the other though.  Both the FlashSystem grid and the SVC can leverage grid architecture as well as PBHA. The SVC and FlashSystem can even participate in a grid together.  This allows the storage the SVC has virtualized, including non-IBM storage, to work together.  By employing both, users can get the advantage of scaling wide through a FlashSystem grid and deep through the SVC’s virtualization.

o      In case you missed Byron's demo at TXC, here is a quick video showing How to Implement a FlashSystem grid. 

o      If you saw him or were curious about what this team does, BethAnn’s blog from a couple weeks ago was a really good summary!

• ·       I will be bookmarking the session on Real life use of FlashSystem grid and PBHA (#1251) as a great resource for understanding the ideology behind FlashSystem grid and how powerful it can be when combined with PBHA. The use case, presented by Andreas Jochum of System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH (SVA), was an incredibly compelling example of how both can take a "swarm" of storage systems into a simplified and manageable storage environment. Most impressively, he shared that the total set up and configuration only took 20 minutes for the FlashSystem grid and about a day for PBHA!

IBM SAN Volume Controller

• ·       There was a customer panel about the IBM flagship product known as SAN Volume Controller (SVC).  Healthy Storage & SVC for decades of uptime (#1157).   This session covered two different real-life cases where SVC delivered real world benefits and improved storage environments and the management thereof.   From reducing rack space by 64% and latency by 80% for Health New Zealand, to providing BITMARCK a resilience layer to achieve no loss of access despite multiple site failures, this session is worth looking over to see just how much SVC can help any customer to meet ever demanding budgets to save money, save storage management time for stretched personnel and keep data safe and environments running in the face of adversity.  This session proves that SVC is alive, kicking and saving time and money for the thousands of customers that use it. 

IBM Storage Defender Sentinel

• ·       There were many great sessions about Sentinel, notably Fireside Chat: CyberSense for IBM Storage Defender Sentinel (#8011) had great conversations around the importance of trusted data resilience, but my favorite session was Scaling Sentinel to protect a large EPIC IRIS Environment (#3038).  A Special Customer Guest Speaker walked through the process of storing, backing up, taking snapshots, scanning data, and recovering into his Validated and Isolated Recovery Environment with Sentinel, IBM Copy Data Management, IBM Storage Protect, IBM SAN Volume Controller and IBM FlashSystem. The Speaker meticulously explained every step and expressed multiple times how he was secure in the integrity of his backups because of Sentinel. Coming from someone with a storage environment with petabytes upon petabytes of data, I am sure that this added security helps his team sleep easier at night.

IBM Storage Defender Data Protect

• ·       Preet Mukhatira’s tech talk Cyber Resiliency with Storage Defender and IBM Cloud Object Storage (#4289) introduced me to IBM Defender Data Protect Vault. This new addition to IBM Storage Defender adds to the capabilities around a hybrid cyber resilience. For more information, here is the official Statement of Direction. I will be keeping an eye out for future real life use cases, especially for those around IBM Cloud COS Cyber Vault (a combination of IBM COS and IBM Defender Data Protect Vault). This slide sums up how Data Protect Vault and IBM COS form a dynamic duo.

Here are some storage topics from TXC that are not necessarily Data Resilience focused but were so interesting that I am saving them for a future research rabbit hole:

·       DS800 Gen 10 + FlashCore Modules

Beth Peterson, DS8000 Master Inventor, gave an incredible session covering the new DS800 10^th generation (#1479).  Beth gave insight into all the capabilities the FCM’s bring to enterprise storage. My biggest takeaway came from the real-life design implementation example, presented by Joel Conoway. His team integrated one DS8A with FCMs as a designated cyber vault into their 3-site design. This new DS8000 provides Ransomware Threat Detection capabilities for their cyber vault as well as keeping costs down by using standard drives on their two remaining DS8K’s.

·       Content Aware Storage

Frank Lee, IBM Distinguished Engineer, discussed how CAS could be leveraged for better insights into unstructured data. His demo showed a chat bot using CAS for searching and reporting purposes, generating reliable responses and providing sources. Based on what he showed, I think CAS will be widely used in the near future, especially when combined with products like IBM Fusion. Here is a quick video on CAS I found helpful.         

TechXchange 2025 was a great learning experience, and it certainly raised the bar for all future conferences. It showed me that IBM continues to be a thought leader in the storage world. Next year TechXchange will be held in Atlanta (Oct 26-29), and I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that I get to go!

IBM TechXchange 2025 - Orlando, FL - October 6-9

IBMers can find the TechXchange 2025 Storage Sessions library here.