1-2-1 DAVE LONGSON
Growth, growth, and more growth!
SNS-UK talks to Dave Longson, IBM’s CTO for Storage UKI, about the market opportunities, technology developments, and the current industry buzz topics, and finds him in a very positive mood!
Q How would you summarise IBM’s storage USPs?
AVirtualisation – IBM has embraced the concept of virtualisation since the 1960’s and we have a number of very well known market leading products in this space. Our current storage array portfolio has been designed from the ground up for optimal use in a virtualised environment.
Solution based – Our storage portfolio is intended to provide our clients with solutions to the business problems they encounter with growth, performance, agility, management, cost, etc. IBM have developed an extensive range of best-of-breed hardware, storage software and services to enable fully formed end-to-end solutions to be architected entirely from our own product range, or point solution easily integrated in multi-vendor heterogeneous architectures.
Efficient – Elimination of waste and reduction of redundant data are critical aspects to managing the explosive data growth currently being experienced. Equally important is controlling the ‘data entropy’ of storage estates – in other words keeping it efficient. IBM storage hardware and software is designed to mitigate inefficient use throughout its entire lifecycle without the need to apply additional costly resources to the task.
Simplicity, ease of use – IBM has made a huge investment in both simplifying storage management and administration and in automating tasks and workflows. The net effect of these investments is that clients can administer storage as a business resource with control, agility and high efficiency.
Q What do you see as the opportunities and threats to IBM in the storage market?
AThe growth of data presents a huge problem for clients in most industry and governmental sectors and gives storage
suppliers challenges in balancing demand with budgets. Here efficiency is paramount; doing more with less in a sustainable way in all aspects of storage procurement and operations – acquisition, deployment, management, environment, etc. This implies taking a smarter approach
to storage rather than simply selling more and more disks. In particular, the mid-range market will probably have to transition to capacities that today would be thought of as large without incurring huge additional management and environmental costs. IBM is very well placed to meet these demands with a range of scalable, efficient and effective storage arrays that incorporate intelligent features to maximise utilisation and maintain efficiency over the life of the array.
Data growth in the market is far outstripping areal density growth achieved by the disk drive manufacturers, and as disk drives get bigger they get slower and their I-O density falls – therefore there is an increasing need for a breakthrough in mass market storage to redress this widening gulf.
Annually IBM invests $6 billion in R&D overall. The goal of the work in IBM Research for Storage is to develop the fundamental understanding and innovative breakthroughs that allows the tremendous rate of progress to continue. At IBM Research, they are also exploring methods using alternate materials and techniques for storing information as well as the manufacturing aspects of storage devices. In addition to work in the fundamentals of data storage technologies, we also pursue numerous projects in system design, both, at the drive level, and at the storage subsystem level. Performance, ease of use, advanced functionality, management of storage, and availability are all key attributes of storage systems.
Q And does having a broad IT product portfolio help you in the storage market?
ABeing one of the very few companies in the industry able to provide IT solutions ‘from soup to nuts’ is a massive
advantage for us and our clients. The ability to supply an integrated product range from mainframes down to small wintel servers with all the associated infrastructure, storage, software and knowhow required to exploit them delivers enormous value for our clients.
Q Big consolidation going on in storage networks right now
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