Hi from IBM edge this is the first post on my new storage blog. I arrived at Edge on Sunday and the first general session was Monday morning. I enjoyed Charles Long CEO and founder of Centerline Digital, he mention how their pure system implementation was letting them do things 4X faster, I would have liked some more info on what the Pure System replaced to make it 4X faster. Centerline Digital http://centerline.net/ did all of the onscreen graphics at Edge. IBM is now pushing all flash arrays as a next game changer in storage. Late last year IBM bought Texas Memory Systems makes of the RamSan devices an all flash array. This is different than SSD disks as this is a chip array and I believe they were throwing around 850,000 iops guarantee as a number and 100 microseconds of latency, Ambuj Goyal spoke about how storage is now a Forethought for IBM and mentioned the 6 Billion Dollars in R&D IBM is spending (1B just for flash) to make storage and associated technologies a forethought. What stuck with me about this statement was IBM’s Main competitors in the storage area storage has always been a forethought since that is the main part of their business. I do think that with Pure Systems and Flash System IBM does seem to have a real roadmap that to me seemed to be lacking in years past. They also pushing the Software Defined Storage and doing it “right” what with Open api’s and integration to open stack, they also took as small shot at EMC by saying that Viper is the new player and they are into thier 3rd generation SDS with SVC/Storwise. I had never thought of SVC as SDS platform and I can buy that however if you are going to consider SVC as an SDS platform it seem vPlex would be a more apt comparison and viper could be considered EMC’s next generation SDS platform. IBM seemed to mention open quite a bit mostly in relation to open stack. I do find it ironic that a few years if you looked up proprietary in the dictionary you might have seen a IBM logo. However I do think is a good sign as I do see a lot of positive change in the way IBM does business with the announcements in the Day 1 General Session. I do wonder about the future of Pure Systems if the rumored sale of IBM server division was to happen.
As far as the tech sessions I was unable to attend my first sessions as there was no room in the inn, the second session I went to was a Lab with about 18 people in however, they only have 4 computers set up to do the lab for Easy Tier and Storwise. So my morning was a Wash, I went to some second choice tech sessions one including one about Tivioli Storage Manager new features, IBM has finally released a GUI management console for TSM and all I can say is, ITS ABOUT TIME. My afternoon sessions were much better Brian Sherman did 2 of them about the DS8870 and SVC/Easy Tier and they were both excellent. IBM has new microcode update for the 8870 7.1 which include VAAI for vmware, however these features are not available for any other DS8000 series, several people gave feedback about this to them and hopefully they will release these features for these older systems as some are quite viable (DS8700, DS8800). Forgot to mention the Delta Rae played at the general session and they were excellent. I high recommend you check them out. http://www.deltarae.com/
Jim Gaffigan was the evening entertainment and he was excellent.
Storage Agnostic 