Tag Archive

Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “IBM”

#181 – Is There a Future for Storage Infrastructure Companies?

Chris Evans 6 November 2020Garbage Collection, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week Chris and Martin debate the future of on-premises storage infrastructure companies in light of announcements and events from IBM, Dell and NetApp. IBM is splitting in two, while Dell and NetApp have recently held virtual versions of their annual conferences. Is the on-premises infrastructure business shrinking and becoming too low-margin to be worthwhile? Martin mentions Lou Gerstner’s book – linked here – Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? The Simpson’s episode where Mr Burns runs for Governor is “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish” – without a doubt a …

#173 – Transparent Enterprise Storage Pricing

Chris Evans 11 September 2020Guest Speakers, Vendors

Enterprise storage pricing has all the simplicity of a mobile phone tariff. Vendors love to obfuscate the costs, whereas prospective purchasers just like a good, honest price. Why does enterprise storage pricing have to be so complicated and can’t we just have pricing online? Chris and Martin chat to George Crump from StorONE about strategies for pricing from both the customer and vendor perspective. Vendors mentioned in this podcast: StorONE, IBM, NetApp, Microsoft Azure, Pure Storage, Dell EMC. Find more about StorONE at https://www.storone.com. Elapsed Time: 00:35:05 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:02:00 – Enterprise storage …

#107 – Should IBM Quit the Storage Hardware Business?

Chris Evans 5 July 2019Garbage Collection

IDC recently released their latest quarterly storage sales figures. The data shows, yet again, that IBM sales continue to decline. In this week’s podcast, Chris and Martin discuss the state of IBM’s storage business. Is it time for IBM to quit? IBM has an embarrassment of riches in storage software and hardware (or a nice portfolio as Martin puts it). Many of these solutions have evolved from other technology, like SVC and XIV. With the acquisition of Red Hat, IBM customers will have even more storage choice. Does this mean more flexibility or confusion? Re-using …

#91 – Storage Field Day 18 in Review

Chris Evans 15 March 2019Garbage Collection

This week, Martin leads the conversation as Chris discusses the vendors presenting at the recent Storage Field Day 18 event. SFD18 is part of the Tech Field Day series delivered by Stephen Foskett and GestaltIT. We last spoke with Stephen in April 2018 – an episode on why storage isn’t boring. Although there’s no official theme for SFD events, the companies presenting were nicely delineated into scale-out primary storage and data protection. WekaIO demonstrated their scale-out file system. VAST Data came out of stealth and also presented a scale-out file system and object store. Storpool …

#82 – Storage Predictions for 2019

Chris Evans 11 January 2019Garbage Collection

The idea of this episode was to put some structure around a set of enterprise storage predictions for 2019. As you will hear from the dialog, that’s not quite what we achieved! However, Chris Evans, Chris Mellor and Martin Glassborow do raise some interesting points on the direction of the industry in 2019. The conversation starts with a look at media. QLC flash is likely to be a hot topic, but what about storage class memory? Have hard drives had their day or is the technology moving into a state of equilibrium? The conversation moves …

#64 – Success & Failure in Storage Startup Land

Chris Evans 31 August 2018Garbage Collection

This week’s conversation follows up on Chris’ recent visit to Flash Memory Summit in the US. Chris and Martin discuss the storage startup landscape and the range of companies appearing at the event. What makes a company successful? Is IPO or acquisition the right route? The discussion starts with a simple, yet tricky question – why does storage continue to be such a diverse market place, with so many solutions to problems? We see a storage “pendulum” effect, with vendors moving between hardware and software. At the moment, there seems to be more focus on …

#56 – Defining Scale-out Storage

Chris Evans 6 July 2018Garbage Collection

This week’s podcast is a conversation between Martin and Chris, talking about how we define scale-up and scale-out storage. A recent discussion on Twitter about Pure1 and the idea of federated scale-out generated some interesting feedback, so we thought it might be good to get some definitions in place. The opening discussion talks about how scale-up and scale-out should be defined and what definitions of scale-out exist. Volume managers used to be the old-school way of implementing federation, as was storage virtualisation. So perhaps federation is a genuine use case. Martin and Chris move to …

#37 – State of the Storage Union with Chris Mellor

Chris Evans 9 February 2018Guest Speakers

This week Chris and Gavin catch up with Chris Mellor, Storage Editor for The Register. With so much happening in storage, it’s difficult to know where to start, so the guys focus on the rumour of Dell EMC reversing into VMware. Could this really happen and why is Dell EMC even thinking about this? The conversation flows on to IBM and their super-mega-hyper-uber announcement on NVMe. Is IBM getting its storage mojo back? Finally, the discussion turns to IoT and how storage and compute move to “The Edge” – no, not Dave Evans, but IoT. …

Garbage Collection #006 – LTO-8 and the Future of Tape

Chris Evans 27 October 2017Garbage Collection

This week LTO-8 was announced, with raw cartridge capacities of up to 12.8TB. In this podcast, recorded on 23rd October 2017, Chris and Martin discuss the evolution of LTO from a lowly 100GB to todays media with 120x the capacity. Tape is changing and becoming more of an archive medium, as backup has increasingly moved to disk. This begs the question, should standard formats like LTFS be more common? How should media be recycled and what other ways are there for getting data onto tape media? For a bit of nostalgia, there’s mention of the …

Garbage Collection – Implementing a Multi-Vendor Storage Strategy

Chris Evans 29 November 2016Garbage Collection

In this podcast, Chris and Martin discuss the issues in designing and implementing a multi-vendor storage strategy. The discussion covers whether any one vendor can provide all of today’s storage products and who multiple vendors can be used to deliver a single requirement. Elapsed Time: 00:36:26 SFW: Yes 00:00:00 – Introduction 00:00:45 – A look at the market – product categories 00:01:30 – Vendor Roundup 00:03:20 – The product overlap problem 00:05:30 – Is storage unique in the data centre? 00:06:30 – Data Gravity 00:07:00 – Why do people change vendors? 00:07:50 – tension …