IBM: Future-Ready Storage That Redefines the Boundaries of the Data Center | Keynote from Denis Kennelly

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Denis Kennelly

General Manager, IBM Storage

IBM

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of IBM’s ‘Future-Ready Storage’ event

With the integration of artificial intelligence into data management systems, IBM Corp.’s conversation around storage has shifted into a whole new gear.The company made a series of storage announcements during theCUBE and IBM’s “Future-Ready Storage Redefining Data Center Boundaries” event. A key element of the latest releases involved the inclusion of AI-powered predictive analytics and data placement for the IBM FlashSystem 5300, yet another example of how AI is reshaping the IT ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)“Generative AI has hit us as an industry,” said Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage at IBM, during an interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio

From data centers to clouds: IBM reveals how information technology is redefining storage strategies

From bustling metropolises to cultural epicenters around the globe, information technology is helping to transform and reshape enterprise companies.As organizations grapple with the dual imperatives of innovation and fiscal prudence, storage solutions are playing a pivotal role in navigating the complexities of modern IT landscapes.“Generative AI has hit us as an industry,” said Denis Kennelly (pictured, center), general manager of IBM Storage at IBM Corp

play_circle_outline Addressing Budget Constraints: Navigating the Shift Towards Data-Driven Infrastructure Transformation

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Keynote from Denis Kennelly

Denis Kennelly

General Manager, IBM Storage IBM

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>> Welcome back everyone to the Future Ready Storage. It's redefining the data center. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, kicking off the program with welcome remarks. Dennis Cannelli, general manager of IBM Stores. Dennis, did you actually come on theCUBE, appreciate you coming on, kicking off the Future Ready Storage event.

>> Thank you, Dave, and delighted to be here. And, welcome to everybody on theCUBE event. I think we're all over the planet, so I don't know whether to say good morning, good evening, or good afternoon. But, welcome everybody and delighted to be on.

>> We have live stream all over the world with watch parties in Atlanta, London, and Istanbul. Let's get it going. So, let's get your perspective kicking us off. What is the current state of IT from your perspective? We're seeing the modernization, you're seeing the cyber resilience needs out there, you're seeing the AI demand from developers. IT budgets are being looked at really hard right now to set the table for the future. What's your perspective on the IT landscape?

>> Yeah, I mean, I think you nailed it, they're the top three trends we're seeing out there. If we were having this conversation maybe two years ago. We'd be talking a lot about digital transformation, cloud app development, building new services, rapid scale, and innovation. The cyber threat is continuous. It doesn't go away unfortunately. And it's something that we have to plan for and manage every day in this business, because we are in the business of safeguarding the world's data. And of course, if you go back in the last 12 months, foundation models, generative AI has hit us as an industry and these are wonderful innovations but very disruptive. And when you put yourself in the customer's shoes, which I like to do all the time, sad to think about this from a customer perspective, how can you take advantage of all these wonderful disruptions of technology and innovations while on the dilemma that the customer faces is, "I have my existing spend on IT infrastructure and supporting existing applications and infrastructure. And how can I rapidly evolve to take advantage of these wonderful innovations?" And that is the crux of the problem facing many clients today. And really, what I'm really excited about and what we're doing here in IBM Storage is really helping address, what I call, a dilemma within the storage industry. Because, if I look at the storage industry over the last number of years, frankly, it has been one of the things that I would say that has been challenged in terms of really embracing some of these newer innovations and what we're really setting out to do in terms of what we're driving in IBM Storage.

>> Dennis, John and I were talking earlier, and I'd like to get your perspectives on this. You have these countervailing effects of you've got the macro, the spending is not growing at the top line, and yet everybody wants to fund gen AI, or survey data shows that about 40% of customers tell us that they're stealing from other budgets in order to fund their gen AI. At the same time, they want to modernize, they want to be cloud native, but security is still critical and they have to fund security. So you have all these different forces, and yet the top line budgets aren't just growing. The CFO is not just opening up the checkbook. So, how do you help customers maintain that budget constraint within that envelope, but still get ready for the future and have efficient infrastructure? What are you doing there specifically?

>> Yeah, and that is the fundamental challenge, because as you said, budgets are not growing overall. There's a shift going on to actually drive these new innovations. And, if I look at storage, and we've stepped back and looked at storage over many, many years. I've been in the industry many decades, right? And, life in storage tends to be, what I call, box-centric. We look at the box, we say, "Well, I'm going to procure a box. It has to have these attributes, it comes in storage size, a capacity, performance." And we tend to look at it as an industry over the lifetime of that asset, in financial terms, usually four to five years. So it's a very constrained and a very static view of the world. Now, you take that and you juxtapose that against what is going on out there. So, you have AI, you have applications, big cloud native data moving and being transformed right across the environment. So you have, what I call, a dilemma going on between these two functions that are pulling at each other. So what we are doing in IBM Storage is really challenging that status quo. Really looking at, "Well, why is it a box-centric world?" Right? I mean, at the end of the day, you have to deploy physical hardware, I understand that. But, when you are in a customer's shoes and the difficult dilemma they have to make is, "Okay, I'm making a purchasing decision over the next four to five years." I mean, if you look back over the last two years alone in terms of disruption, that looks like a lifetime in the IT industry. So how can you realistically be able to forecast what it's going to look like over the next five years? And this is where our customers have huge challenges. I make an investment decision today and I say, I buy a storage device and I want to do X, Y, Z. And then, two years into that, we'll say that five-year lifetime, you realize, "Oh, I need more capacity. I need to go back to the vendor." Or, "It doesn't meet my performance needs." Or, "I have some new AI program that I need to increase the IOPS." Now, all of a sudden, that decision you made two years ago becomes really costly in terms of what I need to do next. And what we are doing fundamentally underpinning that is something called storage assurance, where we are guaranteeing over up to an eight-year lifecycle. And the team will go through this in detail, the investment decision you're making and giving you full flexibility. Now, people will say, "Okay, is that storage as a service?" We have all those offerings, like storage as a service, et cetera as well. But this is very much looking at the lifetime of the asset and really coming to meet the customer where they need us and being available to the customer. Now, the other thing, when I think about a box-centric view, right? So, I talk about four or five years. So, I talked about some of the challenges that happen maybe a copy years into it. But at the end of the day, the lifetime of the platform is that finite period. And what happens at the end of it? Do I go through that difficult cycle all over again, where I actually have to plan again, and actually do all the things that we're doing up front? And then, secondly, how do I take that data that was on the thing that I bought five years ago and move it to this new thing, right? And that's very, very disruptive. And, these are some of the hidden challenges that clients face. And, with another piece of technology, something we call flash grid, we're getting away from this box-centric world, right, and looking more at pools of storage and giving customers full flexibility. So I think, with two things, right, one with storage assurance, I've given you that lifetime guarantee, and two, being able the technology that underpins that, because you really have to think about the end of the life second and what happens next. And we can enable that with some real innovation that we've done in our portfolio with something we call flash grid.

>> Dennis, talk about that aspect. We got a couple minutes left. The IT departments are changing, the consumption is changing. You mentioned some of the things you're doing moving from box-centric world to much more of a abstract data-driven world, distributed, but you still got storage, you still got the boxes in there, you got to have that available. But the energy now is on the AI side and you're seeing the innovation really fast moving, but it also creates risks. So you've got operational costs and you've got risk on AI if they don't hit it. This is changing the IT struggle right now. Can you share your insights into what customers are doing there real quick on their IT perspective, because now they're saying, "Hmm, I got risk. But I also got pressure to innovate." This is shifting the mindset, and also how they're going to deploy and consume the storage for their data.

>> Yeah, I mean, I think, well, risk first of all comes first and foremost in the data itself, and being able to protect that data. And when I look at data protection or data resilience, right, and I look right across the landscape, what customers are really challenged with is... Look, everybody buys primary storage. They buy secondary storage, or backup and archive. We have copies of data everywhere, right? But the challenge is, can we really prove to ourselves and now to regulators and to a lot of the regulations that are coming into place that I can recover that data within the SLA that I actually need. And, a lot of what we are doing right now within the products itself is helping with that basically detection and then fast recovery of that data. So that's critical. That's foundational to everything we do in IBM Storage. And one of the things we very much lead on is core to our products. And then, I think the other piece of it is the financial risk, right? The financial risk and investment. You talked about IT budgets being flat, but yet, you cannot afford a risk not being at the forefront of innovation and losing ground to your competitors. And by some of the flexibility we've built into our storage portfolio that you're going to hear about from the team, hopefully you can see how we're mitigating some of that risk for our clients.

>> Dennis, thanks so much for kicking off the event with the welcome remarks and laying out the landscape and the opportunities that your customers have and enterprise have to redefine and future their storage environment. Really appreciate you taking the time to kick it off and kick off this great program. We've got Sam Werner VP of product management coming up next. He's standing by here in the lives performance here in Palo Alto with watch parties all around the world. Thanks for coming on, kicking it off.

>> Appreciate it guys, and thanks for having me on. And, you're going to hear a lot more about from Sam around the strategy, the innovation that I talked about. And he is going to put meat in the bones that I've talked about, but delighted to be here. Thank you guys.

>> All right. We really appreciate it. General manager of IBM Stores, Dennis, here on theCUBE. We'll be back with more right after the short break with Sam.

Keynote from Denis Kennelly

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>> Welcome back everyone to the Future Ready Storage. It's redefining the data center. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, kicking off the program with welcome remarks. Dennis Cannelli, general manager of IBM Stores. Dennis, did you actually come on theCUBE, appreciate you coming on, kicking off the Future Ready Storage event.

>> Thank you, Dave, and delighted to be here. And, welcome to everybody on theCUBE event. I think we're all over the planet, so I don't know whether to say good morning, good evening, or good afternoon. But, welcome everybody and delighted to be on.

>> We have live stream all over the world with watch parties in Atlanta, London, and Istanbul. Let's get it going. So, let's get your perspective kicking us off. What is the current state of IT from your perspective? We're seeing the modernization, you're seeing the cyber resilience needs out there, you're seeing the AI demand from developers. IT budgets are being looked at really hard right now to set the table for the future. What's your perspective on the IT landscape?

>> Yeah, I mean, I think you nailed it, they're the top three trends we're seeing out there. If we were having this conversation maybe two years ago. We'd be talking a lot about digital transformation, cloud app development, building new services, rapid scale, and innovation. The cyber threat is continuous. It doesn't go away unfortunately. And it's something that we have to plan for and manage every day in this business, because we are in the business of safeguarding the world's data. And of course, if you go back in the last 12 months, foundation models, generative AI has hit us as an industry and these are wonderful innovations but very disruptive. And when you put yourself in the customer's shoes, which I like to do all the time, sad to think about this from a customer perspective, how can you take advantage of all these wonderful disruptions of technology and innovations while on the dilemma that the customer faces is, "I have my existing spend on IT infrastructure and supporting existing applications and infrastructure. And how can I rapidly evolve to take advantage of these wonderful innovations?" And that is the crux of the problem facing many clients today. And really, what I'm really excited about and what we're doing here in IBM Storage is really helping address, what I call, a dilemma within the storage industry. Because, if I look at the storage industry over the last number of years, frankly, it has been one of the things that I would say that has been challenged in terms of really embracing some of these newer innovations and what we're really setting out to do in terms of what we're driving in IBM Storage.

>> Dennis, John and I were talking earlier, and I'd like to get your perspectives on this. You have these countervailing effects of you've got the macro, the spending is not growing at the top line, and yet everybody wants to fund gen AI, or survey data shows that about 40% of customers tell us that they're stealing from other budgets in order to fund their gen AI. At the same time, they want to modernize, they want to be cloud native, but security is still critical and they have to fund security. So you have all these different forces, and yet the top line budgets aren't just growing. The CFO is not just opening up the checkbook. So, how do you help customers maintain that budget constraint within that envelope, but still get ready for the future and have efficient infrastructure? What are you doing there specifically?

>> Yeah, and that is the fundamental challenge, because as you said, budgets are not growing overall. There's a shift going on to actually drive these new innovations. And, if I look at storage, and we've stepped back and looked at storage over many, many years. I've been in the industry many decades, right? And, life in storage tends to be, what I call, box-centric. We look at the box, we say, "Well, I'm going to procure a box. It has to have these attributes, it comes in storage size, a capacity, performance." And we tend to look at it as an industry over the lifetime of that asset, in financial terms, usually four to five years. So it's a very constrained and a very static view of the world. Now, you take that and you juxtapose that against what is going on out there. So, you have AI, you have applications, big cloud native data moving and being transformed right across the environment. So you have, what I call, a dilemma going on between these two functions that are pulling at each other. So what we are doing in IBM Storage is really challenging that status quo. Really looking at, "Well, why is it a box-centric world?" Right? I mean, at the end of the day, you have to deploy physical hardware, I understand that. But, when you are in a customer's shoes and the difficult dilemma they have to make is, "Okay, I'm making a purchasing decision over the next four to five years." I mean, if you look back over the last two years alone in terms of disruption, that looks like a lifetime in the IT industry. So how can you realistically be able to forecast what it's going to look like over the next five years? And this is where our customers have huge challenges. I make an investment decision today and I say, I buy a storage device and I want to do X, Y, Z. And then, two years into that, we'll say that five-year lifetime, you realize, "Oh, I need more capacity. I need to go back to the vendor." Or, "It doesn't meet my performance needs." Or, "I have some new AI program that I need to increase the IOPS." Now, all of a sudden, that decision you made two years ago becomes really costly in terms of what I need to do next. And what we are doing fundamentally underpinning that is something called storage assurance, where we are guaranteeing over up to an eight-year lifecycle. And the team will go through this in detail, the investment decision you're making and giving you full flexibility. Now, people will say, "Okay, is that storage as a service?" We have all those offerings, like storage as a service, et cetera as well. But this is very much looking at the lifetime of the asset and really coming to meet the customer where they need us and being available to the customer. Now, the other thing, when I think about a box-centric view, right? So, I talk about four or five years. So, I talked about some of the challenges that happen maybe a copy years into it. But at the end of the day, the lifetime of the platform is that finite period. And what happens at the end of it? Do I go through that difficult cycle all over again, where I actually have to plan again, and actually do all the things that we're doing up front? And then, secondly, how do I take that data that was on the thing that I bought five years ago and move it to this new thing, right? And that's very, very disruptive. And, these are some of the hidden challenges that clients face. And, with another piece of technology, something we call flash grid, we're getting away from this box-centric world, right, and looking more at pools of storage and giving customers full flexibility. So I think, with two things, right, one with storage assurance, I've given you that lifetime guarantee, and two, being able the technology that underpins that, because you really have to think about the end of the life second and what happens next. And we can enable that with some real innovation that we've done in our portfolio with something we call flash grid.

>> Dennis, talk about that aspect. We got a couple minutes left. The IT departments are changing, the consumption is changing. You mentioned some of the things you're doing moving from box-centric world to much more of a abstract data-driven world, distributed, but you still got storage, you still got the boxes in there, you got to have that available. But the energy now is on the AI side and you're seeing the innovation really fast moving, but it also creates risks. So you've got operational costs and you've got risk on AI if they don't hit it. This is changing the IT struggle right now. Can you share your insights into what customers are doing there real quick on their IT perspective, because now they're saying, "Hmm, I got risk. But I also got pressure to innovate." This is shifting the mindset, and also how they're going to deploy and consume the storage for their data.

>> Yeah, I mean, I think, well, risk first of all comes first and foremost in the data itself, and being able to protect that data. And when I look at data protection or data resilience, right, and I look right across the landscape, what customers are really challenged with is... Look, everybody buys primary storage. They buy secondary storage, or backup and archive. We have copies of data everywhere, right? But the challenge is, can we really prove to ourselves and now to regulators and to a lot of the regulations that are coming into place that I can recover that data within the SLA that I actually need. And, a lot of what we are doing right now within the products itself is helping with that basically detection and then fast recovery of that data. So that's critical. That's foundational to everything we do in IBM Storage. And one of the things we very much lead on is core to our products. And then, I think the other piece of it is the financial risk, right? The financial risk and investment. You talked about IT budgets being flat, but yet, you cannot afford a risk not being at the forefront of innovation and losing ground to your competitors. And by some of the flexibility we've built into our storage portfolio that you're going to hear about from the team, hopefully you can see how we're mitigating some of that risk for our clients.

>> Dennis, thanks so much for kicking off the event with the welcome remarks and laying out the landscape and the opportunities that your customers have and enterprise have to redefine and future their storage environment. Really appreciate you taking the time to kick it off and kick off this great program. We've got Sam Werner VP of product management coming up next. He's standing by here in the lives performance here in Palo Alto with watch parties all around the world. Thanks for coming on, kicking it off.

>> Appreciate it guys, and thanks for having me on. And, you're going to hear a lot more about from Sam around the strategy, the innovation that I talked about. And he is going to put meat in the bones that I've talked about, but delighted to be here. Thank you guys.

>> All right. We really appreciate it. General manager of IBM Stores, Dennis, here on theCUBE. We'll be back with more right after the short break with Sam.