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back to article Big Blue's storage performance badly bitten by pack of mid-range canines

IBM's storage business is shrinking and has been doing so for about four years. The third 2013 quarter's results confirm the trend, with an 11 per cent year-on-year decline to $695.5 million. This shows that action needs to be taken to prevent IBM falling out of the leading storage supplier ranks. A chart of its recent fiscal …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Marketing

    IBM... do some marketing of your PRODUCTS. You'd think from all your Smarter Planet adverts, you were *!)(!#$ GreenPeace

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  2. jabuzz

    Duh

    The days of being able to have a list price for a 1TB SATA drive of £1500 are long gone, that is storage of spinning disks is much more mature and as a result margins are lower. Rather than tracking revenues it would be interesting to track number of shipped drive slots for example.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The XIV is a hidden gem. Maybe some things to work out in the pricing department, but ease of use is impressive.

    As for storwize, let's see what that turns into. I see that they have already started to come up with limited v7000s for smbs.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good Idea?

    IBM made a decision years ago (maybe decades ago) to advertise and promote "ideas" and "solutions" rather than products. The product executives hold their noses and go along with this. With advertising totally controlled and funded at the Corporate level, ambitious product executives keep their mouths shut and go along. Some key product customers don't even know that IBM is in the storage business. They barely know IBM is in the server business. They think IBM is in the "Smarter Planet" business. Do you think this is a good strategy?

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  5. M. B.

    Legacy systems...

    ...are clouding their judgement on this. They need to get away from the DS series stuff and focus on the Storwize and XIV platforms.

    They've made smaller versions of the Storwize platform (v3700, v5000 alongside v7000), but in the other direction they are limited by form factor. IBM should put the software on a pair of x3650's with a pile of PCIe slots and dual sockets with RAM out the wazoo. They would be able to scale up much higher than the v7000. Easy Tier across multiple types of spinning disk. And then scale it all out across multiple pairs of these monster controllers with workload mobility and maybe automated performance load balancing.

    Then they need to define the use cases for XIV much better. Right now, whenever IBM sales comes around they are pitching it as a second- or third-place option for some reason but aren't espousing the advantages, specifically around resiliency and consistent performance. That kind of stuff is pretty important to some customers, often more important that outright maximum IOPS.

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