The adoption and spending on enterprise IaaS and PaaS services continues to rise (see my Figure for the leading supplier revenues on a rolling 4 quarter basis). The question is no longer ‘if’, but ‘how’ to use them effectively, which requires a lot of internal work to bridge the major differences in how these services work and are managed in comparison with traditional on premise enterprise solutions; IBM has continued to provide extensions to its offerings (both software and hardware) to make the process easier and make some money in the process in its latest announcements made today.
Three major announcements
IBM is making three major and a number of minor announcements, which are:
- Spectrum Protect Plus – this software, which provides data availability for virtual machines and applications and data backup to public clouds, can now protect databases (specifically IBM Db2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and MongoDB) hosted on AWS, enabling customers to manage backup repositories held there. It is available from the AWS marketplace on a ‘bring your own licence’ basis. Other new features include the ability to move data to tape archives, support for Amazon S3 Glacier, Azure Storage Archive and IBM’s own COS Archive. IBM is now also providing Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, German and Chinese language versions of the user interface. Also, IBM Spectrum Protect now supports AWS S3 Intelligent Tiering, which can automatically move inactive data to an AWS Infrequent Access class.
- Cloud Object Storage – this cloud service allows customers to extend their data usage to IBM’s cloud. IBM has increased the capacity and performance of its SliceStor devices, which are the arrays on which the service is based. The new Gen 2 SliceStor 12, 53 and 106 devices lower costs by up to 37% per GB, up to 25% more throughput and increase maximum node capacity to 1.27PB (on the SliceStor 106) and single rack capacity to 20.2PB (both 26% higher than for the Gen 1 devices). I’m pleased to see that Gen 1 and 2 devices have been designed to work together.
- Spectrum Discover – this software allows users to gain insight through analytics of their meta-data. IBM has added Dell EMC Isolon, AWS S3, NetApp and Ceph data sources (specifically) and other NFS v3 and S3-compliant sources (generically). It has extended the data insights provided to include a content-based search and tag agent and a regex-based content extraction facility and added disk capacity information on its dashboard widgets. It claims over a thousand different file types are now supported through the use of Apache Tika. It has improved the ease of use of this software by adding support for creating and scanning all connection types, allowing in-progress scans to be stopped and context-driven help tips for data source connection creation.
- Other – it has added its:
- FS9100 to Versastack (the converged infrastructure system it shares with Cisco),
- A new blueprint for customers deploying hybrid on-premise storage alongside AWS Machine Images and IBM bare metal,
- Version 3 of its Blockchain data resiliency blueprint and
- Updates to FlashSystem – including the 2-rack 9152, remote code update and load for the 900 and the ability to upgrade the 9110 to a 9150 through a model conversion program.
- For Spectrum Protect it has added the ability to tier disk-based data pools to tape, support for Spectrum Scale immutable file sets and its ability to recover files remotely from IBM systems running Linux (both z System and Power).
- It has also introduced new C-type top of rack switches, which are NVMe-ready for Fibre Channel SANs.
It’s a lot to digest perhaps, but it fits in well with the decision the storage division made to embrace the cloud a quickly as it could in advance of many competitors and other parts of IBM.
Storage system and raw storage market movements
The market has shown a slight dip in the capacity increases in raw storage I’ve been tracking in my research (see my Figure for a comparison between disk drives, NAND and DRAM devices on a rolling 4 quarter basis) – due partially to a fall-off in demand for the new drives introduced in 2018 and the softness of the server and client device markets since Q4 2018. The disk drive market may now be flatter than before, but shows no signs of going away any more than the tape market, which IBM rejuvenates every few years.
IBM’s storage division has been a pioneer in moving to software, flash drives, the cloud, NVMe drives and SANs; however it remains a very major storage systems supplier, where it held a 5.4% share of the $34 billion spending in the year to the end of March (see my Figure). I expect its performance to improve over the next few quarters with new z System introductions and its decision last year to sell its StorWize arrays exclusively through indirect channels.
IBM is serious about serving hybrid multi-cloud customers
In the early days many enterprise IT departments were against the use of various cloud service because they considered them inherently insecure; IBM continues to deliver new connections which reduce the risk for those faced with the challenge.
‘Hybrid multi-cloud’ is not a generic marketing term; it captures the aim many enterprise customers have to use the best storage and data resources irrespective of where they’re located. To address it properly storage software suppliers have to modify their programs, tools and (sometimes) hardware to work with the different way each cloud handles data and storage – a complex, practical journey. Today’s announcement shows that IBM is fully committed to helping its clients extend their storage to clouds, just as it did with SVC in helping them manage heterogeneous storage arrays all those years ago.
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