IBM Edge took off in Las Vegas on Monday, with a trail of announcements following the conference. The main theme running the show was building for a “cognitive era”, reflected in their launch of cloud-ready systems, services and solutions that simplify the movement of data, applications and services across a hybrid cloud environment. 
 
Organisations across all industries are investing in cloud technologies for innovation, growth and efficiency. Today's clients are seeking a blend of public cloud, private cloud and traditional IT platforms. IBM's new solutions help deepen this hybrid cloud integration.
 
“Today’s business environment is very dynamic and filled with disruption,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems. “A hybrid cloud model enables clients to continuously adapt while also optimizing on-premises investments. IBM is uniquely able to support the flexibility clients need across IBM Systems and the cloud.”
 
Clients are using IBM systems to take advantage of new capabilities, optimize their operations or support changing business demands. On a storage point of view, IBM is focussing a lot of flash storage, as well as software defined infrastructures. In a group interview with Tom, he discussed a lot on flash, as well as adoption towards hybrid models.
 
“We will see the [flash marketplace] continue to grow, more and more storage as the price and the cost of flash comes down, it becomes more and more applicable to more workloads. I used to have this debate that flash is cheaper than high end spinning disk, and now they don’t argue with me anymore. I want to stress, it’s not about price per megabyte, because you don’t need as much flash as you do spinning disk; instead you should look at price per IO per second. How much IOPS do I need, how much flash do I need, how much does that cost compared to doing the same thing with high end spinning disk.”
 
With the announcement of IBM Spectrum family, they are looking at hybrid cloud solutions. IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management is a new solution that drives operational and development agility and efficiency across new and traditional applications by allowing detailed, easy-to-use management of data copies.  Additionally, IBM Spectrum Protect has expanded its hybrid cloud solution integration with cloud object storage options for use in hybrid cloud deployments.
 
Tom stresses that it’s not about the technology, rather what customers need for deployment.
 
“We have flash examples that are 100x faster, but customers might not need 100x faster. So we might see tiering of flash, just like we see tiering of disks – and I’m interested in all of those tiers. That’s why you see flash across our entire portfolio.”
 
Looking at some figures released by IBM based a recent survey of more than 1,000 global respondents from 18 industries:
·         92% said the most successful cloud projects enable creation and support of new business models.
·         They expect 45% of workloads to remain on dedicated on premises systems even as cloud use expands. 
·         83% of the highest performing organizations said cloud initiatives are integrated or highly coordinated.
 
Tom told us that in response to market demands, although coming in a bit later in the all flash offering; he thinks it’s a positive step for IBM to have flash offerings throughout their entire portfolio, and names Pure Storage to be a “very viable competitor”.
 
“We’ve got a tough competitor with [Pure Storage]. If you’re a shareholder you may be disappointed, but independent of the stock market, I think they are a very viable competitor. I’m happy to know what array I have versus what array they have. It’s more difficult in some way because if you’re focused one thing, and that’s all you do, you get it right, you can go straight to heaven; if you get it wrong, you’re done.”
 
With new technologies like hyperconverged and software defined gaining traction, questions were posed to how it affects IBM’s strategy in these areas. Tom isn’t worried – he believes it’s down to demand and what the customers need.
 
“Hyperconverged is a way of doing balanced systems, but it’s only balanced in a scale out, all requirements the same environment. As soon as you deviate from that, or if you ever want to repurpose that, it’s not such a good story. It’s got a purpose and it clearly has a market, and it’s something we are interested in. But I think there will be a continuing need for configurable systems.”
 
Along with the IBM Spectrum announcement, they also announced Power Systems for cloud as well as z Systems for cloud.
 
APAC may be on the adoption learning curve in terms of cloud and software defined, but Tom is confident IBM will be able to help companies in the region. “That’s where you want to tap into expertise. Customers will say “give me an example of how others did this.” Why did they go, where did they go, how did they go. IBM is very good at sharing best practices and we will help [the customers]. Go to someone you can trust, and who has that expertise.”
 
While there are a lot of focus on hybrid whether it’s hybrid cloud or hybrid infrastructure, Tom notes that the most interesting hybrid is between generation, storage and movement of data between private and public infrastructures, regardless of the medium.  
 
“If I want to do backup in cloud, then I would want to be able to do copy data management – so where does it live and how do I leverage it. If I want to store for example medical data images, like MRI or CT scans, it’s hugely expensive. It’s not expensive to store on amazon, but it’s really expensive to get the data out. So if I ever need to re back that MRI or CT scan or X-ray because I want to compare it with the latest to see if there are any changes, or if there’s a law case where you have to recall the evidence. I’ve talked to a few hospitals and they are looking to do object storage model. They are willing to do it on premise or on cloud if that is what’s required.”
 
Also inline with IBM’s focus on supporting open communities and standards, they announced a series of new and expanded collaborations with IBM Systems for hybrid cloud environments. This is to give clients a range of choices to create comprehensive hybrid cloud strategies for their businesses in order to help them address market place demands more quickly. These collaborations include Canonical, Hortonworks, Mirantis, NGINX, and Red Hat.
 
More about IBM’s technology announcements, and details on collaboration can be found here.