Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Last week, I was in Atlanta for the "IBM TechU Comes to You" event at the beautiful Marriott Marquis hotel. This was a three-day event, so here is my recap of Day 1.

Opening Session

Marlin Maddy (IBM Systems Lab Services) acted as emcee to kick off this event. We had about 300 attendees.

Louise Hemond-Wilson (IBM Distinguished Engineer) presented IBM's transition from being a "Systems, Software and Services" company to one that focuses on "Cognitive Solutions and Hybrid Cloud". IBM offerings help clients to accelerate innovation, to analyze their data in context with other public sources of information, and ensure service predictability.

Glenn Anderson (IBM Systems Lab services) presented "Thinking outside the Cubicle". While many of the people in the room are administrators focused on their day-to-day jobs, Glenn argued it would be good to learn what others in the industry are doing, including DevOps, Agile programming, and AlwaysOn approaches.

Marlin came back on stage to give a brief overview of the latest IBM Global Technology Outlook 2015 report. The GTO is IBM Research's vision of the future for IT. It highlights emerging technology trends that will impact the industry in the next 3-10 years. GTO 2015 is dedicated entirely to the historic changes occurring around data.This talk provides an overview of the GTO 2015 topics: data at the edge, data gravity, data-centric enterprises, and brain-inspired systems for processing all that data.

Here are some of the predictions and findings:

• By 2017, data stored on off-premise clouds may equal as much as three-quarters of all data in traditional data centers
• Smartphones already possess more storage capacity than all servers combined.
• Curating data to generate meaningful insights easily can consume 70-80 percent of the time-to-value
• In a lifetime, an average human in the developed world will generate 0.4 TB of clinical data, 6 TB of genomic data, and 1100 TB of exogenous "lifestyle" data
• About 85 percent of consumer transactions and 10% of government and business transactions are in cash, which largely is invisible to analytics today
• 90% of data created over the last 10 years was ABANDONED
• 60% of valuable sensory data loses value in milliseconds

Having data accessible "at the edge" increases business opportunities, speed and value of business decisions.

IBM Spectrum Protect - Roadmap and Futures

Mike Hedden presented this session on what the latest features of IBM Spectrum Protect v7.1.5, and various directions that our development teams are pursuing for upcoming quarterly releases. By a show of hands, most attendees were still using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager v5 or v6.

Introduction to Object Storage and its Applications - Cleversafe

A few years ago, IBM invested over $1B to be the #1 vendor in All-Flash Arrays, led by our IBM FlashSystem product line. A year ago, IBM invested over $1B to be the #1 vendor for Software Defined Storage solutions, including Spectrum Storage family of products. Last October, IBM invested another $1.3B to become #1 in Object Storage, with the acquisition of Cleversafe, a Chicago-based company.

I presented the basics of object store, a radical new way of storing information and how it is different from block or file-based storage alternatives. I then covered the features of our Cleversafe solutions, available as software, pre-built appliances, and in the Cloud. I wrapped up with practical use cases for Content Repository, Enterprise Collaboration, Active Archive, Storage as a Service and Backup.

Software Defined Storage

At this event, we put all three Software Defined Storage sessions back to back, giving attendees the option to choose the time slot that best fits their schedule. Clod Barrera did the first one, then I did mine, and then Jeff Barnett did his.

Clod focused on "Software Defined Environment" which is a broader category that includes Compute, Storage and Network. While Software-Defined Networking has been around for four years now, IBM has invested heavily in Software Defined Compute with the acquisition of Platform Company.

My presentation "Software Defined Storage--Why? What? How?" was more technical than the other two, focusing on key features of each of the six products in the Spectrum Storage family. I explained the new Spectrum Storage Suite licensing that drastically simplifies how TB are counted for an all-encompassing TB-based price.

Jeff focused more on the business value obtained by deploying Software Defined Storage, with practical use cases and client references that had amazing results.

(There were some attendees who attended two or three. If that sounds repetitive, consider Penn & Teller made an entire movie in 2005 called [The Aristocrats] that basically has dozens of stand-up comedians tell the same joke, but each gives a unique spin on it. It's not the song itself, they argue in the movie, but the singer that makes performances memorable. I highly recommend it.)

Integration between IBM Spectrum Scale and Cleversafe

This was a fun session. First, I presented an overview of IBM Spectrum Scale which provides volume, file and object-level storage interfaces on data that can span various flash, hybrid and spinning disk storage devices. Second, I presented Cleversafe for those who missed my earlier session. Finally, I then showed how files can be migrated from IBM Spectrum Scale to either Cleversafe on-premises, Cleversafe in the Cloud on IBM SoftLayer, or LTFS-enabled tape using IBM Spectrum Archive, or to any combination of disk, tape, object storage, Cleversafe and Cloud through IBM Spectrum Protect HSM and Space Management features.

The day concluded with a reception serving food and drinks. There were several booths from our sponsors, including Rocket Software, Catalogix, Storix and others.

Did you miss Atlanta? Want to hear the latest technical information about IBM Storage, but not willing to wait until the big [IBM Edge Conference] this September? We will have several more "IBM TechU Comes to You" events in May and June. To learn more, or to register for one of these, check out the [IBM Technical Events in 2016] landing page. I have negotiated [special discounts] for those who read this blog!

technorati tags: #IBMtechU, Marlin Maddy, Louise Hemond-Wilson, Glenn Anderson, Global Technology Outlook, Mike Hedden, Spectrum Protect, Cleversafe, Software Defined Storage, Spectrum Storage, Spectrum Scale, Spectrum Archive, SoftLayer, LTFS, HSM, Rocket Software, Catalogix, Storix