IBM reorients storage to cloud, containers and as-a-service
On this storage provider profile, we take a look at IBM, which has maybe the longest historical past of all of the storage gamers, and in IT way more broadly, in servers, providers and the cloud.
We discover the corporate properly set on its ongoing efforts to reorient after a interval of declining revenues. That reorientation manifests itself as a powerful embrace with the cloud, containerisation and as-a-service modes of buy.
On this article, we take a look at IBM, its origins, its key storage merchandise, and its method to the cloud, containers and consumption fashions of storage buying.
IBM is a big amongst firms typically, in IT, and in storage.
It was based in 1911 because the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Firm. That was clearly a little bit of a mouthful, so it modified its identify to Worldwide Enterprise Machines in 1924. It turned a pacesetter in punch card recording methods, and later electrical typewriters, calculators and different workplace equipment.
From the Nineteen Sixties, it was core to the roots of recent IT, and led the way in which in mainframe and private computing. Having been a pioneer within the PC market, it began to slip in opposition to rising gamers, and thus bought out of shopper merchandise to give attention to the enterprise.
An enormous and more moderen shift for IBM was its acquisition of Purple Hat for $34bn in 2019. That introduced the Purple Hat portfolio of Linux, and cloud- and container-focused merchandise Ceph and OpenStack, to IBM and confirmed the corporate had put an enormous guess on the cloud.
How does IBM rank in opposition to different storage gamers?
In 2023, in accordance with IDC’s exterior storage system revenues, IBM was eighth when it comes to market share (4.7%) and income of $1.468bn. That was a shade behind Hitachi, which recorded £1.554bn and a 4.9% share. Above these two are – in rank order – Dell, Huawei, HPE, Lenovo, NetApp and Pure Storage.
Eighth place marks an additional relative decline by IBM when it comes to revenues and market share. Within the second quarter of 2021 IDC ranked IBM joint fifth amongst storage array makers, additionally with market share of 4.7%. In 2022 it was seventh, with 4.4% share and income of $1.396bn.
IBM is in a state of relative long-term decline in opposition to different firms, together with in tech.
In 1980 IBM was the eighth largest US firm within the Fortune 500, with no different tech firm within the prime 30. By 2023, it ranked sixty fifth within the Fortune 500, with many tech firms forward of it, together with Amazon and Apple. In 2024 it had crept up the rankings a bit to 63rd.
IBM income has been on a downward development over the previous 20 years, with averages of round $90bn from the flip of the millennium to round 2007 and reaching $106bn in 2011. It has declined since then – right down to round $55bn in 2020 – however with a bit bounce again to $62.7bn for 2024.
However, it’s nonetheless a large. At year-end 2024-2025 IBM turned over $62.83bn in income and had round 277,000 staff. That’s down from 466,995 in 2012. Within the UK presently IBM has 21,000 staff and 125 places of work.
What are IBM’s key storage merchandise?
IBM Storage FlashSystem arrays come within the 5000, 5200, 7300 and 9500 sequence, with media out there in combos of of HDD, 2.5” SSD flash, and NVMe. Capacities improve from about 0.5PB within the 5000 sequence to 4.5PB within the 9500, as does controller CPU efficiency.
IBM added the C200 to this household in early 2025. It comes with larger capability QLC flash drives and is geared toward archive use instances and sequential I/O.
Block storage is the main target, with iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity.
All FlashSystem arrays have connectivity to public clouds for information tiering, migration, replication and snapshots. That performance comes as a part of IBM’s Storage Virtualize working setting, which all these merchandise run.
IBM’s Storage DS8000 household of flash storage is focused at clients with IBM zSystem mainframe methods (through FICON) and IBM i (previously Energy) servers (through Fibre Channel).
The 2 mannequin sub-lines are the entry and midrange DS8A10 with3.69PB most capability, plus the DS8A50 with as much as 7.37PB capability. All provide minimal entry time of 80µs, or 13µs with the mainframe-optimised zHyperLink connection.
IBM claims eight nines availability for DS8000 arrays. They arrive with full information encryption, immutable copies – Safeguarded Copy – to guard in opposition to ransomware, automated tiering and catastrophe restoration performance. Different options embrace hybrid cloud connectivity, various deep integrations with IBM server and mainfame working methods, and container storage through CSI.
IBM Storage Scale is the corporate’s scale-out storage for file and object. It’s based mostly on Storage Scale {hardware} equipment nodes that may scale from a couple of tens of TB to yottabytes, with tens of millions of IOPS per node and throughput into the low a whole lot of GBps. On the software program facet it runs IBM’s Spectrum Scale / Normal Parallel File System and can provide object entry and tiering through OpenStack Swift and S3 APIs.
It’s focused at unstructured information and AI/ML workloads and for deployments that may construct clusters throughout huge geographical areas. Storage media supported embrace spinning disk HDDs and NVMe SSDs. Connectivity is through 100Gbps Ethernet and Infiniband.
IBM Storage Fusion integrates compute, storage and networking right into a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) system that comes with the Purple Hat OpenShift Kubernetes utility platform.
IBM is a long-standing participant in tape, with tape, tape administration and digital tape library merchandise as much as the most recent LTO-10 normal in its TS sequence vary.
Many IBM storage merchandise are additionally out there as software program, together with Storage Fusion, Storage Scale, Storage Ceph (block, file and object storage geared toward AI workloads), Storage Insights AIOps, Storage Defend safety, and Storage Defender which might mix with Storage Defend, FlashSystem’s Safeguarded Copy, Storage Fusion and Cohesity’s DataProtect. IBM QRadar is the corporate’s ransomware discovery and restoration product household.
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is a long-standing part in IBM’s provide, and was referred to as SAN Quantity Controller or SVC. It’s a block storage virtualisation system that may enable storage {hardware} from a number of distributors to speak to one another in addition to to storage within the cloud. It additionally provides superior storage providers equivalent to snapshots, replication and storage tiering.
What markets and workloads does IBM goal?
IBM is large, with a really broad vary of storage merchandise. It has the potential to ship storage for any workload from block storage at entry stage and mid-range to large capability and efficiency and mainframe connectivity. It’s one among two storage distributors with the latter functionality, alongside Hitach Vantara. As with different IT and storage distributors, key focuses presently are on AI use instances, flash storage, hybrid cloud, and cloud-native purposes and containerisation.
How is the position of the cloud within the IBM provide?
IBM has guess closely on the cloud storage, in hybrid- and multi-cloud modes. Key to this technique is use of Purple Hat Ceph and OpenShift as a platform that leans closely on use of containers and cloud native purposes in cloud environments.
The corporate is maybe distinctive amongst array distributors in having its personal hyperscaler-style public cloud with providers for block, file and object storage modes that can be utilized with its cloud servers or naked steel compute.
Cloud File Storage, which supplies NFS file shares from 10GB to 32TB with customisable efficiency ranges.
Cloud Block Storage, which may be indifferent and re-attached to permit for motion between workloads and is geared toward enterprise purposes, databases, and excessive frequency transactional workloads.
Cloud Object Storage is geared toward clients unstructured information and may be deployed on-premise, as a part of IBM Cloud Platform choices, or in hybrid kind.
Its {hardware} and storage software program merchandise additionally enable for hybrid cloud connectivity.
What’s the IBM container technique?
Containers may be managed on IBM through Purple Hat OpenShift or numerous IBM cloud providers.
These embrace OpenShift on IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Code Engine, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and IBM z/OS Container Platform.
What consumption fashions of buying does IBM provide?
IBM’s Storage as a Service works throughout on-premise datacentre and cloud and is predicated on IBM FlashSystem and DS8900F {hardware}. It comes with a base stage set at present wants plus 50% further pre-installed. Base and growth capability value the identical.
Storage as a Service provides three tiers that each one have the identical latency – right down to 50μs – and 6 nines availability, however differ when it comes to minimal capability, IOPS per TB, learn and write throughput. These variations are mirrored in prices that vary from $80 to $225 per TB monthly.
Storage Utility is a pay-per-use mannequin that delivers 200% greater than base capability from day one. Meaning datacentre upheaval is averted by over-provisioning after which utilizing IBM Storage Insights to observe additional capability wants.
Clients pay just for what they use and if their information wants shrink throughout any month, the invoice will replicate utilization, albeit with a minimal “base”.
