Oh Big Blue, can't you think of anything new for your product line? "If in doubt, rebrand" ... has IBM completely run out of ideas with its storage offerings? The Spectrum rebrand of its storage offerings feels like the last throw of the dice. In fact, it is not all of its storage offerings that have rebranded, but appears to be only the software offerings. DS8K, for example, is missing from …
I believe the whole V3-9k range is available through IBM while a sub set of the range is also available from Lenovo I know the 3k is and the 9k isn't but not sure about the 5k and 7k
I heard a rumour that the rebranding stems from the fact that there was some legal dispute of the use of "Elastic". If you are going to rename something because your first attempt didn't come up with something original enough, then why wouldn't you want to try to hide that by rebranding an entire portfolio?
I also wonder if the rebranding is trying to appeal to the millennials, I'm hoping the next brand they come up with is NES.
It is interesting that SVC is not being renamed, it is just that the set of functions it provides has been given a name, is that the first step to making it clear that the flashsystem V9000, storwise Vx000 and SVC all have common software or are they trying to hint at something else?
IBM marketing are utterly clueless. Their brief is that IBM is "transforming", so everything has to be "camss" - cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security. This is based on those at the top wondering why IBM is in decline and looking at companies who are making money.
Obviously, those who stick out are the likes of Google, Apple or Facebook. They do well by invading people's privacy and selling it on (aka "analytics" or "big data"). Apparently everyone lives on the mobile phones now, and to an extent that's true, so we just have to have a piece of that mobile pie.
As for cloud, this has genuinely been a threat to IBM, but not because, as IBM would like to think, because it's something new. Cloud is just outsourcing, but instead of you choosing the tin, we do, and you don't get control of it. But because it's a standard set-up we can deploy things more quickly. Great selling point.
IBM's already had a shot of cloud. The first attempt was old-school IBM - shoddily string together multiple existing IBM products, spend a whole bunch on branding it (everything was "Smart" two years ago) and hope it works.
This is where VSC comes in, or to use its full title (or probably last year's title), Smart Cloud Virtual Storage Center. Basically it's SVC with TPC thrown in. This version of TPC has features which aren't available if you buy it on its own.
For those who know TPC, they'll know it's in the software held together with string category. Having said that, it's actually a decent bit of software nowadays (until it goes wrong). SVC, despite IBM and its attempts to rebrand it and diminish its significance, is a great product, one yet to be matched by the competition (although they're close). It's managed to do this for over a decade now and has spawned Vx000 (another rebranding - "Storwize" this time).
The nail driven in prior to the current "Spectrum" one was "software-defined". Everything "must" be software defined nowadays. Problem is, nobody actually knows what that means. If you define the term as the clever storage code is written in software and runs on standard CPUs on a standard OS as opposed to a dedicated ASIC, then IBM's been software defined since the ESS (which used to stand for Enterprise Storage Server, not Elastic Storage Server, before that was rebranded DS8000 - still with me?). OK, a lot of the code ran on the adapters in firmware but it was all software.
SVC was always software. Yes, so it runs on X series tin, but that was only because X series was IBM. It could run on any x86 hardware. Always could. But rather than pointing this out and dismissing the term as the bullshit it actually is, IBM chose to jump on the bandwagon and go for another rebranding exercise.
Anyone who knows anything about storage knows that if you want high IOPs and low latency, you need to define the hardware very carefully and use low level, optimised code to run on it. Yes, you can get throughput from most hardware, but it's at the expense of latency, which doesn't generally matter for throughput intensive applications.
So how is this rebranding paid for? Obvious. By "restructuring" which is IBM's brand name for driving away their best employees by making them redundant or generally making their working conditions so bad they leave anyway.
And now for the all-important disclaimer - this rant is my own personal opinion and not that of my employer. Or any former employer for that matter.....
I hate to say it, but John Akers had the right idea 25 years ago: Break IBM into 5 companies. (Servers, Storage, SW, Services, Research.) Let them compete with each other and with all the others. I believe stockholders would be at least twice as rich as they are now. Look at the Bell companies. Stockholders fairly quickly got rich when it "broke up."
> ...John Akers had the right idea 25 years ago: Break IBM into 5 companies
When Balmer was retiring from Microsoft, I thought it was a perfect opportunity for IBM & MS to merge. And the first order of business after their merger would be to break the company up into 12-15 smaller independent companies (mixing & matching pieces from both source companies).
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