In a keynote speech today at IBM Enterprise, Jamie Thomas, General Manager, Storage and Software Defined Systems at IBM, unveiled a bold strategy for the company’s storage business. Building upon the Software Defined Storage portfolio announced last May, IBM is focusing its storage business on a new model for enterprise data storage that is optimized for interoperability across hardware and software solutions. This new model will provide greater flexibility around how customers can receive, consume and explore different options for data storage, which will ultimately allow customers to better harness their data for greater business insights.
 
Adoption of storage software is growing. Fueled by advances in cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security technologies, data continues to grow at an unprecedented rate –generating 2.5 billion gigabytes of data per day. Organizations are continually under pressure to make real-time decisions based on the data available to their organization. Through the use of a software defined storage environments, data is available faster, which allows analytics solutions to glean near-time insights and drive strategic business decisions.
 
In her keynote, Thomas noted that as organizations grapple with an explosion in data and the pressure to transform their business with new technologies, the traditional hardware-based storage model must evolve. Storage and data-centric infrastructures must serve as the foundation in order to provide the speed and automation necessary to derive business insights through analytical tools. She also launched IBM Elastic Storage Server, an integrated software defined storage appliance that combines IBM POWER8 server with storage software code named Elastic Storage.
 
“The reality is that many of our clients are suffering from information overload, and data centers are feeling the pressure,” said Thomas “To help ease this pressure, we are providing flexibility to enable clients to choose the environment that best fits their needs, whether that is an integrated hardware/software solution through IBM, enterprise-class software on top of existing infrastructure or storage-as-a-service via the cloud. Software defined storage is disrupting the industry, and we’re leading the market by applying our storage and software heritage to the data management challenges of businesses today.”
 
As access to derive business value from data through analytics continues to gain critical importance, clients are looking for the means to efficiently store and mine their data while ensuring privacy and security. Based on the company’s deep expertise in the storage industry as well as big data and analytics, IBM can now provide greater efficiency to clients looking to better manage, organize and use data as a competitive tool.

Unlocking the power of insights through analytics has changed clients’ expectations of how data is processed and stored. In traditional storage environments, data is stored and analyzed in silos on disparate systems. With a software defined storage strategy, IBM combines these data management systems to make it easier for organizations to retrieve insights in near real-time to create increased efficiencies.

IBM Software Defined Storage offerings will be available through three flexible delivery models:

• Storage delivered as Software: IBM Elastic Storage, SAN Volume Controller and Virtual Storage Center 
• Integrated software and hardware storage solutions: IBM Elastic Storage Server
• Storage via the cloud: IBM Elastic Storage on SoftLayer

Forward thinking organizations like Ping An Insurance, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), United States Tennis Association and Caris Life Sciences are unlocking the power of Software Defined Storage. IBM provides clients across industries with breakthrough technology that enables infinite scale while allowing customers to achieve high performance and reduce storage costs. This enables organizations to fully harness the potential of Big Data while taking advantage of transformative technologies such as cloud.