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January, 2014:

Storage Blues…

Jan 28th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
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January not even out yet and already we have an interesting technology market happening; IBM’s withdrawal from the x86 server market does lead to a number of questions. Both on the future of IBM but also on what IBM feel the future of the market is; yet could this be another market that they withdraw from only to long-term regret as they did with the network market allowing Cisco to dominate?

IBM’s piecemeal withdrawal from the hardware market; a retreat to the highlands of the legacy enterprise market in hardware will lead to questions across the board as to what the future is for any IBM hardware. I am not sure of the market acceptance of their converged compute/network/storage strategy in the form of PureSystems; their me-too ‘Block’ offering but surely this is dead-duck now; Lenovo may continue to make the x86 components for IBM but how committed can we feel that IBM is to this. IBM appear to have completely ceded this space to their competitors; personally I’m not convinced by most of the converged offerings and the value but to completely cede a market seems to be rash.

But how does this impact IBM storage?

The heart of IBM’s Storwize product set is x86-based servers; SVC especially was ‘just’ an IBM server. IBM were one of the first companies who really leveraged the idea of the server as storage; Shark is and was simply a pair of RS/6000 or pSeries boxes, this has allowed them to utilise and share R&D across divisions. Something which should have been an advantage and enabled them to do some clever stuff; this stuff  they demonstrated yet never delivered.

Now there is no reason for them to simply source the servers from others, the same as almost every other storage company in the world and it moves the Storwize product set firmly into the realms of software (it was anyway) but will IBM move Storwize to a software-only product?

There is part of me who really feels that this is inevitable, it may be as a reaction to a move by a competitor; it may be as a move to enable a vV7000 to run as a cloud appliance? It may well end up being the only way that IBM can maintain any kind of foothold in the storage market.

No I haven’t forgotten XIV or IBM’s Flash offerings; XIV is a solid Tier 1.5 offering but it is also a collection of servers. XIV’s issue is really scalability and simply putting larger drives in is just reducing the IOP density. The Flash offering is as good as many and if you want raw performance without features; it is worth considering.

IBM’s GSS could be built into something which scales and with many of the ‘features’ of XIV. And in a software only IBM Storage strategy; it could develop into a solid product if some of the dependency on specific disk controllers could be relaxed. Yet the question has to be whether IBM has time.

And yet without either a scalable NAS or Object store; IBM have some real problems. None of which are are really hardware problems but moving away from building your base platform probably makes none of them easier to solve.

Or perhaps if they concentrate on software and services….

Already Getting Busy…

Jan 15th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
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I’ve not been away but a mixture of illness, Christmas and general lethargy have meant that I’ve not bothered with writing for a bit. But 2014 and a new year appears to be upon us and I do wonder what it is going to bring us, especially in the world of IT infrastructure.

As we ended 2013, we saw both winners and losers in the world of Flash for example; Violin crashing as they struggle to increase sales and reduce burn; yet Pure seem to be on a stellar rise and hiring like maniacs. A UK launch is imminent and they are going to be interesting to watch. All Flash Arrays are still very much niche and even companies who need them are holding off on making any big decisions.

I’ve already spoken to a hybrid vendor this year; pushing their hybrid is good enough for most cases, very tied to the virtualisation use-case. And yes, VDI all over their powerpoints as a use-case. 2014, the year when VDI happens!!

I expect that I’ll spend time with more hybrid vendors who are playing some kind of chicken with SSD/Disk ratios; how low can they go? However, I’m also seeing more KVM/Openstack appearing on road-maps as they begin to realise that VMware might not be the only game in town.

I’m sure we’ll see more hype around hyper-convergence as attempts continue to build a new mainframe and I shall continue to struggle to work out why anyone wants to? I like being able to scale my infrastructure in right place; I don’t want to have to increase my compute to increase my storage and vice versa. Flexibility around compute/storage and network ratios is important.

Yet convergence of storage and compute will continue and there’s potentially some real challenge to the traditional storage technologies there. If I was building a new infrastructure today, I’d be looking hard whether I needed a SAN at all. But I wouldn’t be going straight to a hyper-converged infrastructure; there be dragons there I suspect.

I’ve already had my first vendor conversation where I’ve suggested that they are actually selling a software product and perhaps they should drop the hardware part; that and asking why the hell were they touting their own REST API for cloud-like storage…if industry giants like EMC have struggled against the Amazon juggernaut, what makes they think that they are any different?

And marketing as differentiation will probably continue….especially as the traditional vendors get more defensive around their legacy products.  No-one should get rich selling disk any more but it won’t stop them all trying.