Entries tagged as ‘IBM’
Actually a good thing for IBM and their customers
IBM launched a major new storage initiative. Byte and Switch summarized it succinctly.
The message sounds a bit EMCish, specifically their Digital Universe from last year. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, if IBM can execute in a unique way. The issue is clearly universal. If your competitor’s tapped into a core need, sometimes it pays to swallow your pride and join the ride.
The “Information Footprint” concept is a nice nod to Green without hitting us over the head with it.
I’m looking forward to see what IBM does with this over the next year or two.
Categories: Datacenter · Storage Systems
Tagged: Digital Universe, EMC, green, IBM, Information Infrastructure
Thanks to Ruptured Monkey for this campy but cool IBM video from the Fifities on how their RAMAC (and the disk drive) was created.
(photo courtesy of IBM.com)
Categories: Random
Tagged: disk drive, IBM, RAMAC
EDS differentiates HP more than you might think
Could Om Malik be on to something? Unlike other analysts looking at HP’s pending acquisition of EDS as a me-too consultancy move - similar to IBM acquiring Price Waterhouse Cooper a few years back – he sees HP shooting for the clouds.
His rationale: EDS’ clear strengths in outsourcing, plus other recent HP acquisitions all pointing to building out a global data center infrastructure.
This would be a great play for them to put their comprehensive server and storage system portfolio to work in-house.
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends
Tagged: data center, EDS, GigaOm, HP, IBM, Om Malik, PriceWaterhouseCooper, PWC, Storage Systems
Enterprise Strategy Group’s Mark Peters and I sat down in Minneapolis today and talked shop. Besides having a cool Oxford-trained English accent, his views on the storage landscape rang true to me:
- The storage system market is out of balance right now, with several “big boys” (IBM, EMC et al) and dozens of “little guys” playing in the same sandbox.
- This is not sustainable, and causing the industry mainstays to make unusually bold moves (witness EMC’s SSD and Mozy forays and IBM’s Diligent and XIV acquisitions)
- Xiotech and Atrato are exciting because they are promising clear, core benefits. “Do you want maintenance-free storage, or storage that requires service visits/costs/risks?”
- Xiotech and Compellent are both based in Minnesota with common management roots, but seem to have staked out two distinct storage solution spaces. More on this in another post.
- “Green” is overhyped. Mostly storage companies mean “energy efficient”, and would do well to be clearer on this.
Keep your eyes peeled for a new blog from Mark. Not too surprising given ESG’s success with Steve’s IT Rants blog. I hope Mark dives in. His unique perspective would benefit many.
Categories: Industry trends · Storage Systems
Tagged: Compellent, Diligent, EMC, Enterprise Strategy Group, ESG, green, IBM, Mark Peters, Moshe Yanai, Xiotech, XIV
Potential risk for IBM competitors currently using Diligent’s product
Byte and Switch is referencing Israeli media reports that IBM has acquired Diligent for $200M. The deal’s been talked about in the blogosphere, including here, for a few weeks now.
Deduplication is an important enabling technology for the data center. Diligent, EMC’s former Israeli lab, is a dedupe leader. It’s not clear what this will mean for IBM competitors HDS, Sun and Overland that are licensing Diligent’s technology today.
There may be a bit of scrambling as the music stops on the dedupe round of techno musical chairs.
Categories: Company Profiles · Datacenter · Industry trends
Tagged: deduplication, Diligent, HDS, IBM, Moshe Yanai, musical chairs, Overland, Sun
Destroying data can be as important as creating it
How much time do you spend talking with your customers about what to do with their solutions when they are done with them? Maybe you should rethink your priorities.
According to Seagate, 50,000 enterprise drives are retired every year. In this age of highly proprietary business data and hyper-sensitive customer records, destroying information can be as important as creating it. How do businesses guarantee that data is completely removed from retired servers and storage – and PCs ?
Seagate, IBM and LSI have taken a step towards making this incredibly simple and inexpensive. With Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.6 FDE drive, available this summer, data can be made to disappear forever from retired server and storage drives with a single command.
This technology already exists for notebook PCs. In all cases, make sure proper password management procedures are in place before implementing these drives. Once the key is lost or erased, the data is gone forever.
More from Seagate on secure storage here.
Anyone out there using FDE in notebooks today? How is it working for you?
Categories: Data Security · Datacenter · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: Cheetah 15K, disk drives, FDE, IBM, LSI, retire, Seagate
Moshe Yanai and connection makes this intriguing
Byte and Switch says IBM is looking at acquiring Diligent, which includes what was EMC’s Israeli lab. The interesting connection is Moshe Yanai, who engineered the recent purchase of Israeli-based XIV a few months ago.
An added incentive for IBM is that they have been relatively quiet about deduplication, which is Diligent’s forte.
Update: Storagezilla adds some color on Diligent, EMC and IBM.
Categories: Company Profiles · Datacenter
Tagged: Byte and Switch, deduplication, Diligent, IBM, Israel, Moshe Yanai, storage, XIV
Server virtualization is helping storage shrug off a weak economy
Byte and Switch observe that disk storage demand continues to expand, even as a recession threatens in the US economy. They see server virtualization and specifically the SCSI storage systems supporting it as the reason.
No surprise to me. Storage demand is limited primarily by the ability to manage it effectively. Virtualization makes server deployment easy, and iSCSI arrays make it easy to feeding their appetite for terabytes. Case in point: Dell’s Equallogic.
VMWare has helped open the door wide for real-world server virtualization, with Microsoft eager to walk in with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.
A future big spark for business storage demand will be the “top-down” mainstream technology shift driven by XIV at IBM and Hulk/Maui at EMC.
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Storage Systems
Tagged: Byte and Switch, Dell, Equallogic, IBM, iSCSI, storage, virtualization, VMWare, XIV
