StorageKilter Blog

Notes from IBM’s Analyst Summit

October 8th, 2009

The IBM Information Infrastructure Analyst Summit in Boston on October 6-7 was an opportunity to catch up on where IBM is going with its IT infrastructure strategy. Many of the plans we saw were quite crisp; others were less so.

Some things about meeting with IBM never seem to change: their slides, for instance, are always chock full of information… typically far more than the human eye can deal with.  This makes them much better as reference documents than as presentation showpieces.  Fortunately, the company is also very prompt at making softcopy of the slides available to the audience, a courtesy that other vendors ought to emulate.

Cloud and virtualization technologies have moved to the forefront for both servers and storage, and the meeting coincided with several announcements regarding cloud-based offerings:  the IBM Information Archive, a private cloud storage offering (branded as the IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud) and a trio of cloud-related consulting offerings.  Both services and products appear quite real, and are fully consistent with IBM’s stated intent to capture a larger slice of enterprise IT by adding cloud-based services to their mix of offerings.  If the marketeers are going to do well by the technologists however, they will really have to crisp up their strategy.  After all, these are early days for cloud computing and we have not passed the point where many of the most basic definitions regarding cloud are still up for grabs. This ought to be the sort of opportunity that gets the marketing juices flowing because it represents a terrific opportunity for industry leaders such as IBM to guide (or, less generously, to co-opt) the new terminology.  Let the technical marketers work de jure standards through industry trade groups and standards associations; this is the point at which marketing departments can create de facto standards, and these are the ones that are the chief influence on buying decisions.

It was good to see that the company’s acquisition of Diligent about 18 months ago has gone well.  Diligent’s ProtectTier dedup technology is beginning to penetrate several areas of IBM storage, so don’t be surprised to see deduplication extended well beyond VTLs and the backup and recovery process. If IBM gets it right, this will likely prove to be a significant differentiator for IBM when it comes to managing IT operations.  Why?  Because their dedup technology (a “single pass” approach, using a memory-resident index rather than a two-phase hash-based process that involves disk I/O) allows them to be in the data path, an option not be practical to other methods.  This — in theory — lets them insert the process anywhere they want in any data path. Potentially — again, in theory — this is an opportunity to reduce both intramural and WAN data traffic.

I’ll be watching.

Entry Filed under: Storage strategies