No one will ever argue that IBM is one of the founding fathers of the storage industry.
In 1949, they figured out how to take the information on 35,000 punch cards and store them on magnetic tape. Through the years, we have seen them evolve that magnetic tape into vacuum tubes, disk platters, and most recently, flash drives. IBM has withstood assaults from competitors, such as Wang, Digital, Amdahl, Memorex, and StorageTek. Today, they face a new line of more agile foes like PureStorage, Infinidat and Nimble. Not to mention the constantly changing landscape of storage, which has moved from the ground to the clouds. Regardless, IBM remains relevant. Their storage offerings have never been stronger and more integrated. A customer can buy into a low level device and still achieve virtualization, compression and performance. The same interface that manages the low level device is able to manage the largest and highest performing set of subsystems in the industry. As an example, IBM has taken their Flash product and integrated it with their virtualization product to create a multi-use, high-performing, economically advantageous, feature-rich, virtualizing storage device that every end user needs to consider. The most recent releases of their DS8 and XIV products will include all flash options, furthering their ability to deliver the highest performance, most advanced function, as well as ease of use.
IBM may not be the market leader in every facet of the storage industry, but they are firmly planted in the upper right hand quadrant of the popular Gartner chart. They have vision and they can deliver. AND, unlike some of their previous competitors, they’re not going anywhere. They are still relevant, and they’re here to stay.