Re: Flash is up, spinning rust is down
@Pascal
Would you put digitise your entire music and video collections, throwing out the CDs/vinyl/DVDs, all of your photos, and all of the important documents you have on that single SSD in your laptop, with no other copies of it?
Of course, there are plenty of people who are stupid enough to do that but in the enterprise, data needs to be protected against media failure, and several backups need to be kept. Yes, an enterprise could buy flash for everything, just as a shipping company could use planes and motorbike couriers and do away with lorries and shipping containers. It would work and it would be quick, but it wouldn't exactly be price-competitive.
Flash is no doubt a great place to put data which needs to be accessed quickly, but ask IBM if they put all their multi-petabyte Cleversafe object stores on flash.
IBM did very well to buy TMS - it's a good product, even if the RAS was a bit crappy before they had to re-engineer it (at the expense of its best feature - latency). The older stuff was designed for 15K drives and it's not really working out for them any more.
The reason IBM is not releasing actual numbers for the all-flash and software-defined stuff is because they're most likely (allegedly etc.) manipulating the numbers to back up their argument that their "strategic direction" is the correct one. If a deal includes a bunch of all-flash systems and some of the legacy stuff, you can guarantee that while the customer sees a single, bottom-line price, the legacy stuff will be heavily discounted and the all-flash stuff won't be. Makes the numbers better.
I shouldn't really single out IBM here - this sort of thing is rife in the industry. Many products "sell" heavily even if they're thrown in free as part of a deal. Often they will sit and gather dust. But it's a sale nevertheless.