The Storage Tank

Storage is a wonderful place to work. It seems like every few months someone or something new is coming out with the latest way to make it easy to store more data for less. There seems like about 100 new startups all begging for money and clients all the while trying to build new code bases to fix issues solved by the Big 5 years ago.

The 5 big five of course being IBM, EMC, NTAP, HP and HDS in some sort of order. These companies have spent Billions of dollars researching and engineering ways to store the simple bits of our 1s and 0s. Now in the new age we see these companies struggling for sales and even the market share leader of ~45% is being sold to a PC company because its not making the money it did a few years ago.

If you look at what is happening in the storage industry you can see why. Price per TB is rock bottom thanks to our buddies at Amazon and Google. IT Directors expect these cloud prices of pennies on the TBs in order to keep up with the demand on budgets. Just think 30 years ago gas cost $1.09 and a GB of data cost you $105,000. Now gas is around $2.00 and a GB of data? Well let’s just say it is around $0.03. What other commodity has fallen so quickly as data storage?

Another reason is efficiency. Storage has gotten better at making better use of the disks and better space savings all together. You can see it in the technologies like XIV and VSAN where the disks are dumb and the RAID is software. Also through in Dedupe, compression, clones, etc. and now the system that you bought for 100TBs a couple years ago is compared to a system with the same hardware (drive sizes anyway) that can push 300-500TBs of capacity. So that $100,000 storage array that was pushing 100TB is now the same cost for 500TBs.

And the last reason I see causing companies to squirm is Software Defined Infrastructure. Companies buy what hardware they want and then lay down their preferred software on top to manage and protect their data. And since its a heck of a lot easier to start a software company where you don’t have to worry about all of those pesky firmware versions and interop-ability matrix things, they are sprouting up like dandelions.

Now put it all together, lower cost /TB, better efficiency, and more software sales reps will lead to lower sales and lower potential. There is only one way out. Those who can put all of this together.

I have heard over and over that everyone wants to move out of hardware and move to cloud based or hybrid cloud. I see the value in cloud and I believe it has a place in the data center but for the most part I see it as a low cost storage platform where data is hosted for non mission critical applications. You want to run you email or CRM system there? sure go for it. You want to run distribution system or your surgical system out there when Netflix and Chill is happening? Probably not.

So to the Big 5 as a 2016 word of advice, embrace your hardware. It makes you different. It gives you a chance to walk into customers and give them a choice. Don’t fall for the flashy object of cloud (honestly the margins can’t be that good). Spend time developing integration into applications so things can work better together. Spend time reaching out to other companies and seeing how you can integrate their technologies into your own with out having to acquire them.

In the long run, people are going to make the best choice for their company and one shoe doesn’t fit all. The more you can offer and the better the offerings are, the better the customer will feel about your company. And who knows they might take a look at something else you sell down the road.

It appears IBM has removed the requirement for XIV systems running 11.6 that need to over provision beyond what the box is provide. Before 11.6 a XIV customer had to ask a Technical Advisor (TA) to submit a RPQ and then they would dial into the system to change the total amount of storage that could be provisioned. This was normally done because of thin provisioning but now even more so becuase of compression on XIV. 

Here is the information I see in the release notes:

XIV 11.6 Command Reference: system_soft_capacity_set soft_size=SizeGB

This command is used to set the size of the system soft capacity. The soft capacity size of the system can be set to up to 3 times the size of the hard capacity of the system, and as low as the maximum size between the currently allocated soft capacity and the system’s hard capacity (whichever is greater). The current hard, soft, and/or allocated soft capacity can be retrieved using the system_capacity_list command.

I still would advise any customers wishing to change the soft capacity to speak with either a TA or a support person. 

If you are attending the IBM Inetconnect conference there is a TON of storage related sessions.  Here is the link to the main page where you can find out all the information about general sessions and the Aerosmith concert.

To build your agenda you can go to the portal here: IBM Interconnect Portal

There you will see all sorts of information about the conference and you can sign up for sessions ahead of time. You can look at certain ‘tracks’ for different types of sessions or you can search for them based on the date/time or session topic.  If you are interested in a storage related topic I have listed them below. Do notice that these sessions are at Mandalay Bay.

If you see me in the halls feel free to introduce yourself and I will buy you a coffee/beverage of choice.

Good Blog article by fellow IBMer Ron Riff:

Every once in a long while there are discoveries that, well, change everything. Stuff like discovering the earth isn’t flat, it’s round. People talked about that possibility for centuries but it wasn’t until a Ferdinand Magellan expedition stepped out and circumnavigated the globe that everything changed. In some ways, today’s announcement of IBM® Spectrum Storage™  has done the same thing for the idea of software defined storage.

Introducing IBM Spectrum Storage – Inside Perspective.

Today IBM is announcing a new storage platform named Spectrum.  This new family of products allow customers to handle the burden of increasing storage needs. There are a few blogs and articles already out there so I am not here to re-hash those. I will point out the fact we are able to offer our storage products in both a software only form or a tried and true system is something unique.

I took this from the announcement today. As you can see we are truly taking the material from our existing software and now making them a part of a family.

Spectrum Control (IBM Virtual Storage Center) allows control of the infrastructure with analytic-driven data management that will help reduce cost by up to 50 percent.

Spectrum Protect (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager) reduces backup costs and protects data.

Spectrum Accelerate (XIV as Software) allows for accelerated enterprise storage for cloud deployments.

Spectrum Scale (Elastic Storage) scales high-performance storage up to 1B petabytes of unstructured data.

Spectrum Virtualize (IBM SAN Volume Controller) can virtualize mixed environments and store up to 5 times more data.

Spectrum Archive (IBM LTFS) can archive data that allows fast access and reduces TCO for archived data by approximately 90 percent.

As you see, some of these were software products already and they were added to the family. What I am most impressed with is now the ability to buy the XIV software and create your own XIV with your hardware. When I first hear about this about a year ago, I didn’t understand the real value in doing an all software offering for XIV. But since then I have seen where customers are wanting to either create smaller XIV systems than our 55TB systems or they are wanting to run a standard hardware platform which costs them less to maintain.

I also see great opportunities for IBM to move the XIV software stack into a hyper-converged solution where customers can run more than just storage on box, but their networking, applications and middle-ware as well. The other aspect is it opens up the ability to run an all flash XIV, more then 15 ‘modules’ which equals larger scale. Who knows what else is in the works for this product but I think we/IBM is on the right track.

The other big news coming out of IBM today was the announcement of a $1 BEEELION  dollar investment in R&D for IBM Storage Software over the next 5 years. According to the press release, the money will help clients with object storage and open standards.

To accelerate the development of next-generation storage software, IBM also announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in its storage software portfolio over the next five years. With this investment, the company aims to extend its storage technology leadership having recently been ranked #1 in software defined storage platforms for the first three quarters of 2014 by leading industry analyst firm IDC.¹ The investment will focus on R&D of new cloud storage software, object storage and open standard technologies including OpenStack.

As you can imagine, that is a huge commitment for IBM or for any storage company. I think this goes to tell that IBM is in the storage business for the long haul and our commitment to our clients stays strong. From what I can tell from our R&D teams, there are some really cool things coming down the road and I am for one very excited about IBM Storage.