Reg man has the cure for IBM storage: Just swallow 10 firms

> most of IBMs entry and midrange portfolio was in the hands of a major competitor.

You do realise that IBM resell NetApp via GTS? Just because STG has stopped the OEM does not mean that selling has stopped.

Dan -- thought many of the same things as I read the article. No hybrid solution? What do you call the V7000's I have mixed with SSD's and HDD's? I still find them a better fit (and less expensive) than the AFA's out there today where you also have to rely on getting advertised compression and deduplication rates... also it all fits nicely under TPC and I can virtualize my older storage (probably even my N-Series boxes which will be fine for years to come with third party support) behind SVC (standalone or built into the V7000).

I'm hoping their unified solution continues to mature -- we have lots of N-Series and that disruption has been a messy one for us.

Count me in as a customer who still likes most of IBM's storage portfolio. The Storwize line is great, and I even prefer LTFS/LTO for cold data archival rather than the latest trends like Glacier (it's less expensive and when someone needs to pull satellite imagery they don't need to wait for it to get pulled down via our internet circuit!)

With all of that said, we'll likely dip our toe in the hyperconverged space sometime next year. Don't know that it'll be cheaper -- just a different way to get much of the same things done. We're blade center based with FC infrastructure already built out, so costs would seemingly shift to needing more network ports to accommodate the Nutanix-style pizza boxes (maybe there will be more blade-based options soon).

Re: IBM Cures

"...but they cannot develop without funding."

Dropping that 20 EPS target might free up some funding. Future product funding is a major worry for long term customers, who worry about investing in constructs that won't have any legs not due to competition but due to neglect.

Re: IBM Cures

Server based flash and spinning drives may serve their purpose, but arrays still serve their purpose. You cannot get the availability and redundancy a serious virtualized environment needs. Software defined everything companies promote that software wil rule everything, but fail to realize that without a serious hardware foundation the entire structure will collapse. And to be honest server based controllers are not nearly as powerfull as array based controllers. You could scale out, but that has it's own performance challenges as you add and add nodes.

Re: IBM Cures

Your hair must be super gray if you think flash (or other high-end) storage is happening at $750/GB! Do you realize the street price of most all-flash arrays are below $10-15/GB (raw, without de-dupe) at this point? Do you also realize how smart of an acquisition TMS was for IBM, and how this proves they are capable of making further great acquisitions? Being less worried about the future of your legacy disk business than every other vendor is, happens to be IBM's biggest strength right now.

Re: Ossified

"The fact that they've switched their employees' desktops to Linux..." has one small failing, it isn't a fact.

Some people with access to key client sensitive data are forced to use Linux but the rest of us are quite free to continue with the latest flavour of Windows, and do.

Re: New POWER8 servers:

nobody writes about these things because sparc, risc and power even itanium are dead. all companies who still sell these are either bleeding money in that business unit or planning to move over x86 completely (oracle/sun, hp even on non-stop, etc)

vmware killed them, even though they were great products. somehow, they didn't stack up to the vmware cost model and the ease of use of the cloud.

yes, they will still have their market as the mainframe has it's slice, but very tiny.

nobody cares about speeds and feeds on high end cpus/platforms anymore because they cost so much think about it: it will still work for a while as there are apps designed for these platforms, but every new app now gets written for stacks that are in the cloud. developers and especially new companies don't give a damn about technology, they just want their app to work so they get vm's on aws, azure or just build their own stack on vmware or hyper v. .or kvm

that is why nobody cares about the mighty CPU's anymore...