Latchford: IBM's extensive set of software and hardware offerings provide our customers choices when developing an ILM strategy and implementation plan.
IBM Global Services (with 180,000 professionals in 160 countries) can provide our customers with extensive help in developing their ILM strategy, as well as providing assessments, migration, integration, and implementations in ILM, business risk and compliance, business continuity, infrastructure simplification, and other IT requirements.
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IBM also has a suite of software products, including TotalStorage Productivity Centre, SAN File System, DB2 Content Manager, Commonstore, and Tivoli Storage Manager, that allow our customers to analyse data, classify it, and store it on the most appropriate device. Coupled with IBM's hardware for data retention, IBM provides ILM solutions ranging from document management to e-mail archive.
Latchford: In an era where customers want to do more with less, the idea behind storage virtualisation is to reduce costs and improve performance. What proof points -- such as industry benchmarks -- does EMC offer to show that their storage virtualisation offerings do this?
Redman: How can you reduce cost by buying more equipment and adding a layer of complexity to your environment?
Funnily enough EMC has gained a great reputation over the last few years for driving down the cost of information storage. Driving down cost is one of the major goals of ILM.
ILM helps customers simplify their environment using consolidation technologies like networked storage and server virtualisation (such as VMware) to improve utilisation and flexibility. The other aspect from an operational point-of-view is to do more with less. Here we see automation software like EMC's range of Storage Resource Management helping administrators manage their heterogeneous environment from "one pane of glass".
Redman: What is IBM's approach to archiving?
Latchford: IBM bases its approach to archiving around three core ideas:
- Know your data.
- Automate and manage active data.
- Archive and dispose of inactive data based on policies and events.
IBM's approach is to identify, classify, and place the active data on the most appropriate device to meet the business needs.
Inactive data is archived to a lower-cost storage (typically SATA or Tape), based on the time-to-retrieve and the cost-of-ownership requirements.
Latchford: By adopting IBM's server technologies, our storage solutions are continually becoming faster and more powerful. As a standalone storage vendor, are you confident that your products will keep pace?
Redman: I am a little puzzled by this question because a lot of IBM's storage range is OEMed from other manufacturers. EMC is the worldwide market leader in information storage and management. To maintain and extend our leadership, this year alone EMC will spend nearly US$1 billion on R&D. I estimate that this is more than the next 10 competitors combined!
It is also quite amusing that IBM's high-end range and our DMX both use PowerPC microprocessors. The difference between them is that the EMC DMX can have up to 128 of these working together. In the mid-tier, EMC's CLARiiON range is based on an Intel architecture and EMC has been able to double the performance of the range on average every 18 months at about the same cost. (This is about twice as quick as others are able to bring new products to market.) This means that EMC is the price/performance leader in all the categories we compete in.
From a customer's point of view the key issue in upgrading is how painful is it?
All EMC products run a consistent "operating" system, and this means the upgrade preserves the maximum amount of investment as they go forward. Also as new functionality comes out, older systems get more capable!
A number of EMC's new customers are telling me that IBM's history of switching between its own products and products that are OEMed causes them immense pain in upgrading. Basically IBM's upgrade becomes a new install and they go to market. EMC shows companies how we do data-in-place upgrades from one generation to the next . . . and they become EMC customers. Â Â
