back to article IBM flashy January announcement: Wanna know what's in it?

The storage jungle drums are beating and Vulture Central's storage desk thinks it may know a thing or two about an IBM announcement due on 16 January. The event, a virtual one, is one of many in IBM's Infrastructure Matters series and you can register for it here. Let's do this in the order in which the drums started beating …

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  1. Nigel 11

    A long time in the planning?

    It was quite a few years ago that IBM sold its hard disk business. At the time there was speculation as to motive. Was it simply because IBM saw it was labouring under a disadvantage, trying to sell its hard drives to competitors in the server space such as HP and Compaq? Or was it because IBM believed this was a business with a declining long-term future, and sold out before that view became widely held?

    I suspect the latter. They compare IBM to a elephant. It can't gallop, but it can move surprisingly fast and knows better than most large companies where it is and where it wants to get to.

    1. ducatis'r us

      Re: A long time in the planning?

      Errrr.....

      http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/?lnk=mprST-dsys-usen

      they may not make them but they still sell them

    2. Kebabbert

      Re: A long time in the planning?

      The reason IBM sold the hard disk business is this:

      Back then, hard disks increased storage capacity at a very high pace. So, if you extrapolate the development, IBM drew the conclusion that in a few years, there will be 500GB disks which could store everything you could imagine. So it would suffice with one single disk to store everything a small team could produce. So you would not need to buy as many drives anymore. One disk would suffice. And this is true today; all documents, source code, etc a small team can produce will easily fit into a 2TB disk today. Even a larger team, or maybe, the entire Linux source code with all revisions back to the very beginning, would fit into a 2TB disk. So, why would IBM keep manufacturing hard disks? They would be too good and large in a couple of years. Better sell the hard disk division while IBM could get a high price for it. That is the reason.

      IBM manegement reasoned uncorrectly. They reasoned something like this: future cpus will be much faster than today, so one cpu will suffice for many people. Better sell off the cpu division now.

      The fallacy is this: the more cpu power one gets, the more demanding applications they run. In the same vein, the more storage one gets, the more data they run. No matter how much cpu or storage you get, you will always find a use for it.

      "Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh."

      1. ducatis'r us

        Re: A long time in the planning?

        This is nonsense, end of. Hands up who wants to keep everything on a single disk, whatever that means....

  2. Javapapa

    IBM's business DNA

    Sometimes I think in their heart of hearts, IBM would prefer to sell only to governments and Fortune 500 companies, and over drinks after a golf game at that. Datacenters (clouds) is a way to revive the old Service Bureau business model, or at least retain their existing enterprise customers from bolting.

    Just my humble opinion, I could be wrong. I was, once, when in 1983 I paid $8,000 dollars to buy a Datapoint 1560 with 128 KB ram and two 1MB eight inch floppies. But, hey, running Datashare, I could hear the programs page fault!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sorry

    > Sometimes I think in their heart of hearts, IBM would prefer to sell only to governments and Fortune 500 companies

    I don't think that's true anymore with software acquisitions such as Trusteer, Fiberlink (www.maas360.com), Worklight, Aspera etc. IBM is selling to businesses of all sizes. They just don't market it as much as they could/should IMHO

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