IBM’s new US$1bn baby – Big Blue wants to redefine storage economics

18 Feb 2015

Technology giant IBM is investing more than US$1bn in its storage software portfolio over the next five years as part of a broader strategy to manage storage on any device.

IBM has revealed a new storage software portfolio that it claims will change the economics of storage by applying a layer of intelligent software.

It does this by applying a “data footprint” hat stores every bit of data at the optimal cost.

The new IBM Spectrum Storage platform incorporates more than 700 patents and focuses on the hybrid cloud business model, making it possible to manage storage via a single dashboard.

IBM said it plans to invest US$1bn in its storage software portfolio over the next five years.

Demand for storing data in the cloud is increasing

“A new approach is needed to help clients address the cost and complexity driven by tremendous data growth,” said Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President, IBM Systems.

“Traditional storage is inefficient in today’s world where the value of each piece of data is changing all the time. IBM is revolutionising storage with our Spectrum Storage software that helps clients to more efficiently leverage their hardware investments to extract the full business value of data.”

Rosamilia said that as new applications require cloud delivery or deployment, the demand for storing data in the cloud is increasing.

This requires a new approach to managing data with a layer of software on top of existing storage hardware to drive innovation. 

Industry analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2019, 70pc of existing storage array products will also be available as “software only” versions.

By 2020, between 70pc and 80pc of unstructured data will be held on lower-cost storage managed by software defined storage environments.

Cloud infrastructure image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com