By Jamie Thomas, IBM
Remember the classic “I Love Lucy” episode when Lucy and Ethel took jobs in a candy factory and found themselves contending with an ever-faster conveyor belt?
A similar scene is playing out as the world deals with the exponential growth in data being generated by mobile devices, social media and sensors in everything from cars to water systems. Do you make an airline reservation with your iPhone or tweet about your experience with a department store? Those activities generate streams of ones and zeroes that didn’t even exist a decade or so ago and are now sending the data conveyer belt into overdrive.
To meet the demand to store all of that data, my company today has announced software-defined storage with the release of IBM Spectrum, a software-only suite of storage solutions, as well as a $1 billion commitment to storage software over the next five years to move to a high-value storage software business model. This change will help move the storage industry forward into the next era.
The analyst firm IDC predicts that by 2020, our hyper-connected world will total 40 zettabytes of data -– a 50-fold increase from the beginning of 2010.
How big is a zettabyte? It’s the contents of 20 million four-drawer file cabinets … multiplied by a million.
Human history has never witnessed such an information boom, and it will only become more intense as the Internet of Things -- or the state of autonomous interaction among a range of everyday objects and devices that’s being touted as the next huge tech trend -- takes hold and carries even more data into the cloud.
This nearly incomprehensible data explosion presents an obvious but perplexing problem: Where do you put it all? And how do businesses access it quickly so they can meet consumer expectations and stay competitive, whether that means understanding customer behavior, enabling proactive and smarter healthcare, or offering a more personalized travel experience?
The answer is to think of today’s dramatically changed tech environment as not only a data revolution, but also as a storage revolution. One simply will not work without the other.
Just as the industry is reaching the physical limits of the microchip, both physics and economics are dictating new ways to store and access massive amounts of data. It may not be widely known that storage represents one of the high tech industry’s most fertile and important opportunities for innovation.
Throughout history, my company has helped define the data technology marketplace, from delivering the world’s first hard disk drive to magnetic tape to industrial-strength flash arrays. So we’ve been putting a great amount of research dollars -- in the billions -- into solving the unique and pressing challenges that companies face today.
What we’ve found is that companies and other large organizations want three principal things:
1. They want to securely put more data in the cloud, rather than merely adding more physical storage to their data centers. This saves money and achieves scale. Just as homeowners can’t keep adding closets as their family grows, it makes no sense for organizations to simply “box” their way out of the storage crunch.
2. Data is becoming “borderless.” That is, companies want to be able to access and analyze data wherever it makes the most sense for the data to live, whether that’s in the cloud or one internal system or another. Limiting the freedom of data and locking it in separate devices, isolated from each other, prevents a business from, say, gaining important insights that helps it keep pace with new business trends. It’s a form of business blindness that few can afford in 2015.
3. Not only is the volume of data increasing but so is its variety, from numbers on a spreadsheet to “unstructured data” such as photos, videos and Facebook posts. And companies want to consume and analyze this information, whatever its form, in real time or near real time for valuable business insights.
As so often is the case in modern society, from smarter cars to the tablet you may be reading this article on, the answer is intelligent software. Think of it as “Job Switching,” which was the title of the “I Love Lucy” episode that aired on Sept. 15, 1952. Instead of the hardware itself doing all the heavy lifting, intelligent software that manages the storage infrastructure is proving highly effective in handling today’s unprecedented data.
What these new capabilities bring to the table is stunning. You can pool data on multiple computers simultaneously and read it in parallel, for faster results. You can add more storage capacity in minutes, as needs arise. Data can flow seamlessly among hybrid, private or public clouds to support today’s mobile app economy. The software can marry traditional storage resources with cloud workloads and manage them as a cohesive whole through a single management dashboard.
The ability to manage and get the most out of data, without breaking the bank doing so, is one of the hallmarks of a modern digital enterprise infrastructure. The results can be sweeter than candy.
Jamie Thomas is General Manager of Storage for IBM.
Follow the conversation at #softwaredefined.
