What’s The Story Behind IBM’s Storage Surge?

Why are the new products you announced this week important?

The new products are part of IBM’s overall strategy to release a range of new workload-optimised systems in 2010. The new storage products are designed to reduce the cost and complexity of storing vast amounts of data while making it easier for clients to apply analytics and gain insight from the data. This is what clients want—they are looking for storage technology that will improve efficiency and reduce costs, increase capacity and intelligently place the data where it can perform the best for workloads like real-time analytics, database or transaction processing.

We announced this industry-first capability in IBM’s DS8700 disk storage system. Working again with IBM Research, we created a set of algorithms that perform this intelligent placement of data in an easy and very economical approach. We call this IBM’s System Storage Easy Tier feature. Easy Tier learns about a client’s application data patterns over a short period of time and then begins to place the “hot” data on the fastest storage and the “cold” data on the slower and less expensive storage. It continuously learns, intelligently placing data as the application data patterns change over time. All this is done automatically, and we have proven it can increase throughput by 300 percent. Let’s say it’s approaching end of month and a client needs ready access to purchasing trends to feed the business analytics, with many organisations accessing and updating the same data—this “hot” data would be placed in the fastest storage devices to maximise responsiveness and performance. Similarly, let’s say that a file hasn’t been touched in months but is still needed to meet government regulations such as HIPAA—this “cold” data would get placed on slower, more economical storage and then could ultimately be placed out on tape for the best long-term economical archival solution.

Along these lines, we also announced new solutions for storing unstructured retention data. One of them, the LTO Ultrium format, is an open tape storage technology that can help dramatically lower energy consumption and reduce storage media costs up to 10 times. The other, the IBM Long Term File System, provides a simpler way to provide file system access to the very large data archives created by unstructured data. The Long Term File System is especially well-suited for the growing storage needs of industries that generate digital media such as media and entertainment, medical, and digital surveillance. We also announced we’re adding a “many-to-one” replication feature to our ProtecTIER deduplication technology that allows multiple data centres or remote offices to replicate backup data to a central location.

Finally, we introduced our latest XIV Storage System, doubling the storage capacity of the system while continuing to dramatically lower clients’ operational costs through improvements in energy efficiency.

These innovative products are rooted in IBM’s ability to help clients maneuver through the life cycle of data management, focused in three areas: efficiency, data growth and delivering competitive advantages to our clients

What are some examples of how your clients are using IBM storage?

The University of Heidelberg is using our SoNAS (Scale Out Network Attached Storage) to support their BioQuant research centre, which is dedicated to modeling the extreme complexity of life and is expected to generate up to 12 petabytes of data and more than 500 million files. Thought Equity Motion makes news, sports, entertainment and creative footage accessible to content producers and digital channels. It beta tested the IBM Long Term File System and found that it could lower the company’s storage costs significantly. Fox Chase Cancer Centre in Philadelphia was generating a terabyte of new data per month, backing up the same data repeatedly and generating an exponential number of copies of the same things. They implemented IBM deduplication technology and slashed their physical storage by 90 percent. Welch’s is using XIV to better forecast expected sales of its grape juices and jellies while lowering storage costs. Welch’s is a well-known brand, but it’s actually a small company owned by family farmers, so it’s essential to keep technology costs down.

How do you leverage the rest of IBM?

It all starts with leveraging IBM’s Research capabilities to create real breakthroughs in the storage industry; next we leverage IBM’s Systems and Software stacks through solution integration and optimisation with a focus on delivering offerings that are targeted at client’s workload challenges; and finally we leverage IBM’s Global Technology Services to provide clients with the right service based offerings to help them implement, manage and monitor their IBM storage whether it be as part of their own infrastructure, managed by IBM or in the cloud. Of course, IBM is always ready to help clients finance their acquisition of storage as well through our Global Financing capabilities. So I’d say that IBM has truly integrated itself for client’s benefit, enabling them to decide how they want to consume hardware plus software plus services.