IBM keeps it real with Storwize V7000 It has been very gratifying to see the IBM Storwize V7000 and SVC getting some real love from IBM over the past couple of years. The latest bunch of announcements are good: it'll be bigger and faster, says IBM, yet it presents this news with some realism. IBM's in-house storage blogger Barry Whyte is not one to try and pull …
IBM storage is dead! The numbers are tanking and without a server biz, they have nothing to attach to (historically their main strength - very very few people have IBM storage without having IBM servers - I sold IBM storage for years and it is almost exclusively to 'house' accounts). The features that are mentioned in the article are them just trying to catch up with the competition and the absence of dedupe, and fairly mediocre performance mean that they are struggling to stand out! Dell and Netapp are waning too, HP 3PAR and EMC VNX2 are the only 'traditional' arrays that are still growing and the rest of the interest in the market is towards AFA's, hybrids and SDS.
Nonsense, I have sold a ton of XIV to customers without IBM servers.... IBM's big problem in storage is that they used to only play at the high end, DS8. Yes, they had mid-range, LSI Engenio, but only true blue shops bought that stuff. The lion's share was DS8 and the tape that went with it. People are buying a lot less tier one, be it IBM, EMC or HDS tier one, and that has disproportionately hurt IBM because, unlike EMC, they were heavily skewed towards the high end. Their capacity installed continues to grow, but you need to sell a lot of XIV and V7000 to get to the same number of dollars as the smaller amount of DS8 they used to sell.
" HP 3PAR and EMC VNX2 are the only 'traditional' arrays that are still growing "
Someone sells 3PAR.
Everyone has that problem though so don't try and make out IBM are suffering more than the rest. The fact is that customers are moving more to a 'good enough' approach and midrange arrays are way more capable than before. Everyone needs to sell a lot more than they used to to get to the same $ amount. Yet IBM seem to be doing a much worse job of that than most of the other vendors. Everyone is shifting more capacity than they used to so that defence is weak!
Looked at a V7000, but decided to get rid of IBM storage (DS4700) here. Any problems we have the answer is always upgrade firmware. Other vendors will upgrade your firmware for you. With IBM, it is up to you to determine what part numbers you have, what the current version is, what version you have, what the upgrade path is, etc.
After you have done all that, they will determine it is an SVC problem and you will have to call SVC support. SVC support will then tell you to upgrade the SVC firmware.
You get the idea.
IBM only sells storage to IBM shops who run blue in their veins. They win by refreshing the servers and then give away the storage to lock in the deal. New features, capabilities, performance, meh not really. Why innovate to a platform that is already fading fast. SystemI is rapidly becoming that last proprietary OS hold-out that will become the next IT do-do bird.
IBM don't even get to the shortlist in most RFP's these days and often don't even get asked to respond. There really is nothing special about the IBM portfolio right now. XIV has run out of bullets. V7000 is perceived as too low end and DS8 has only ever really been thrown into large mainframe deals as a freebie. And the most recent RFP I'm thinking about where they didn't even get asked to respond (pSeries customer and they do have some storage footprint already) was down to them selling their x86 business and not being seen to have a converged strategy moving forward.
XIV, V7000 and FlashSystem are all growing pretty rapidly.
The x86 thing isn't really a problem. If people were interested in a one vendor strategy, then the top storage providers in the world wouldn't be best of breed storage only providers, e.g. EMC, NetApp, HDS. The only provider who has sold servers and has also been a top storage provider is IBM.
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