A transcript of a discussion on how consistent global storage models best accelerate and enable pervasive analytics that support digital business transformation.

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How Storage Can Help You Digitally
Transform in a Hybrid Cloud World
A transcript of a discussion on how consistent global storage models best accelerate and enable
pervasive analytics that support digital business transformation.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: IBM Storage.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you’re
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Our next data strategies insights discussion explores how consistent and global storage models
can best propel pervasive analytics and support digital business transformation.
Decades of disparate and uncoordinated storage solutions have hindered enterprises’ ability to
gain common data services across today’s hybrid cloud, distributed data centers, and
burgeoning edge landscapes.
Yet only a comprehensive data storage model that includes all platforms, data types, and
deployment architectures will deliver the rapid insights that businesses need.
Stay with us now as we examine how IBM Storage is leveraging containers and the latest
storage advances to deliver the holy grail of inclusive, comprehensive, and actionable storage.
To learn more about the future promise of the storage strategies
that accelerate digital transformation, please join me now in
welcoming our guest, Denis Kennelly, General Manager, IBM
Storage. Welcome, Denis.
Kennelly: Thank you, Dana. It’s great to be here.
Gardner: Clearly the world is transforming digitally. And hybrid
cloud is helping in that transition. But what role specifically does
storage play in allowing hybrid cloud to function in a way that
bolsters and even accelerates digital transformation?
Kennelly: As you said, the world is undergoing a digital
transformation, and that is accelerating in the current climate of
a COVID-19 world. And, really, it comes down to having an IT infrastructure that is flexible,
agile, has cloud-like attributes, is open, and delivers the economic value that we all need.
That is why we at IBM have a common hybrid cloud strategy. A hybrid cloud approach, we now
know, is 2.5 times more economical than a public cloud-only strategy. And why is that? Because
as customers transform -- and transform their existing systems – the data and systems sit on-
premises for a long time. As you move to the public cloud, the cost of transformation has to
overcome other constraints such as data sovereignty and compliance. This is why hybrid cloud
is a key enabler.
Kennelly

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Hybrid cloud clears the way for transformation
Now, underpinning that, the core building block of the hybrid cloud platform, is containers and
Kubernetes using our OpenShift technology. That’s the key enabler to the hybrid cloud
architecture and how we move applications and data within that environment.
As the customer starts to transform and looks
at those applications and workloads as they
move to this new world, being able to access
the data is critical and being able to keep that
access is a really important step in that journey.
Integrating storage into that world of containers
is therefore a key building block on which we
are very focused today.
Storage is where you capture all that state, where all the data is stored. When you think about
cloud, hybrid cloud, and containers -- you think stateless. You think about cloud-like economics
as you scale up and scale down. Our focus is bridging those two worlds and making sure that
they come together seamlessly. To that end, we provide an end-to-end hybrid cloud architecture
to help those customers in their transformation journeys.
Gardner: So often in this business, we’re standing on the shoulders of the giants of the past 30
years; the legacy. But sometimes legacy can lead to complexity and becomes a hindrance.
What is it about the way storage has evolved up until now that people need to rethink? Why do
we need something like containers, which seem like a fairly radical departure?
Kennelly: It comes back to the existing systems. You know, I think storage at the end of the day
was all about the applications, the workloads that we ran. It was storage for storage’s sake. You
know, we designed applications, we ran applications and servers, and we architected them in a
certain fashion.
And, of course, they generated data and we wanted access to that data. That’s just how the
world happened. When you get to a hybrid cloud world -- I mean, we talk about cloud-like
behavior, cloud-like economics – it manifests itself in the ability to respond.
If you’re in a digitally transformed business, you can respond to needs in your supply chain
rapidly, maybe to a surge in demand based on certain events. Your infrastructure needs to
respond to those needs versus having the maximum throughput capacity that would ever be
needed. That’s the benefit cloud has brought to the industry, and why it’s so critically important.
Now, maybe traditionally storage was designed for the worst-case scenario. In this new world,
we have to be able to scale up and scale down elastically like we do in these workloads in a
cloud-like fashion. That’s what has fundamentally changed and what we need to change in
those legacy infrastructures. Then we can deliver more of our analysis-services-consumption-
type model to meet the needs of the businesses.
Gardner: And on that economic front, digitally transformed organizations need data very
rapidly, and in greater volumes -- with that scalability to easily go up and down. How will the
As the customer starts to transform and
looks at those applications and workloads
… being able to access the data is critical
and being able to keep that access is a
really important step in that journey.

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hybrid cloud model supported by containers provide faster data in greater volumes, and with a
managed and forecastable economic burden?
Data delivers insights across disparate environments
Kennelly: In a digitally transformed world, data is the raw material to a competitive advantage.
Access to data is critical. Based on that data, we can derive insights and unique competitive
advantages using artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools. But therein lies the question, right?
When we look at things like AI, a lot of our time and effort is spent on getting access to the data
and being able to assemble that data and move it to where it is needed to gain those insights.
Being able to do that rapidly and at a low cost is critical to the storage world. And so that’s what
we are very focused on, being able to provide those data services -- to discover and access the
data seamlessly. And, as required, we can then move the data very rapidly to build on those
insights and deliver competitive advantage to a digitally transformed enterprise.
Gardner: Denis, in order to have comprehensive data access and rapidly deliver analytics at an
affordable cost, the storage needs to run consistently across a wide variety of different
environments – bare-metal, virtual machines (VMs), containers -- and then to and from both
public and private clouds, as well as the edge.
What is it about the way that IBM is advancing storage that affords this common view, even
across that great disparity of environments?
Kennelly: That’s a key design principle for our storage platform, what we call global access or a
global file system. We’re going right back to our roots of IBM Research, decades ago where we
invented a lot of that technology. And that’s the core of what we’re still talking about today -- to
be able to have seamless access across disparate environments.
Access is one issue, right? You can get read-access to
the data, but you need to do that at high performance and
at scale. At the same time, we are generating data at a
phenomenal rate, so you need to scale out the storage
infrastructure seamlessly. That’s another critical piece of
it. We do that with products or capabilities we have today
in things like IBM Spectrum Scale.
But another key design principle in our storage platforms is being to run in all of those
environments -- bare-metal servers, to VMs, to containers, and right out to the edge footprints.
So we are making sure our storage platform is designed and capable of supporting all of those
platforms. It has to run on them and as well as support the data services -- the access services,
the mobility services and the like, seamlessly across those environments. That’s what enables
the hybrid cloud platform at the core of our transformation strategy.
Gardner: In addition to the focus on the data in production environments, we also should
consider the development environment. What does your data vision include across a full life-
cycle approach to data, if you will?
We are generating data at a
phenomenal rate, so you need
to scale out the storage
infrastructure seamlessly.

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Be upfront with data access in DevOps
Kennelly: It’s a great point because the business requirements drive the digital transformation
strategy. But a lot of these efforts run into inertia when you have to change. The development
processes teams within the organization have traditionally done things in a certain way. Now, all
of a sudden, they’re building applications for a very different target environment -- this hybrid
cloud environment, from the public cloud, to the data center, and right out to the edge.
The economics we’re trying to drive require flexible platforms across the DevOps tool chain so
you can innovate very quickly. That’s because digital transformation is all about how quickly you
can innovate via such new services. The next question is about the data.
As you develop and build these transformed applications in a modern, DevOps cloud-like
development process, you have to integrate your data assets early and make sure you know the
data is available – both in that development cycle as well as when you move to production. It’s
essential to use things like copy-data-management services to integrate that access into your
tool chain in a seamless manner. If you build those applications and ignore the data, then it
becomes a shock as you roll it into production.
This is the key issue. A lot of times we can
get an application running in one scenario
and it looks good, but as you start to
extend those services across more
environments – and haven’t thought
through the data architecture -- a lot of the
cracks appear. A lot of the problems
happen.
You have to design in the data access upfront in your development process and into your tool
chains to make sure that’s part of your core development process.
Gardner: Denis, over the past several years we’ve learned that containers appear to be the gift
that keeps on giving. One of the nice things about this storage transition, as you’ve described, is
that containers were at first a facet of the development environment.
Developers leveraged containers first to solve many problems for runtimes. So it’s also
important to understand the limits that containers had. Stateful and persistent storage hadn’t
been part of the earlier container attributes.
How technically have we overcome some of the earlier limits of containers?
Containers create scalable, cloud-like benefits
Kennelly: You’re right, containers have roots in the open-source world. Developers picked up
on containers to gain a layer of abstraction. In an operational context, it gives tremendous
power because of that abstraction layer. You can quickly scale up and scale down pods and
clusters, and you gain cloud-like behaviors very quickly. Even within IBM, we have
containerized software and enabled traditional products to have cloud-like behaviors.
We can get an application running in one
scenario and it looks good, but as you start to
extend those services across more
environments – and haven’t thought through the
data architecture – a lot of the cracks appear.

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We were able to quickly move to a scalable, cloud-like platform very quickly using container
technology, which is a tremendous benefit as a developer. We then moved containers to
operations to respond to business needs such as when there’s a spike in demand and you need
to scale up the environment. Containers are amazing in how quickly and how simple that is.
Now, with all of that power and the capability to scale up and scale down workloads, you also
have a storage system sitting at the back end that has to respond accordingly. That’s because
as you scale up more containers, you generate more input/output (IO) demands. How does the
storage system respond?
Well, we have managed to integrate containers
into the storage ecosystem. But, as an
industry, we have some work to do. The
integration of storage with containers is not just
the simple IO channel to the storage. It also
needs to be able to scale out accordingly, and
to be managed. It’s an area we at IBM are
focused on working closely with our friends at Red Hat to make sure that’s a very seamless
integration and gives you consistent, global behavior.
Gardner: With security and cyber-attacks being so prominent in people’s minds in early 2021,
what impacts do we get with a comprehensive data strategy when it comes to security? In the
past, we had disparate silos of data. Sometimes, bad things could happen between the cracks.
So as we adopt containers consistently is there an overarching security benefit when it comes to
having a common data strategy across all of your data and storage types?
Data protection prevents multiple angles of attack
Kennelly: Yes. It goes back to the hybrid cloud platform and having potentially multiple public
clouds, data center workloads, edge workloads, and all of the combinations thereof. The new
core is containers, but you know that with applications running across that hybrid environment
that we’ve expanded the attack surface beyond the data center.
By expanding the attack surface, unfortunately, we’ve created more opportunities for people to
do nefarious things, such as interrupt the applications and get access to the data. But when
people attack a system, the cybercriminals are really after the data. Those are the crown jewels
of any organization. That’s why this is so critical.
Data protection then requires understanding when somebody is tampering with the data or
gaining access to data and doing something nefarious with that data. As we look at our data
protection technologies, and as we protect our backups, we can detect if something is out of the
ordinary. Integrating that capability into our backups and data protection processes is critical
because that’s when we see at a very granular level what’s happening with the data. We can
detect if behavioral attributes have changed from incremental backups or over time.
We have managed to integrate containers
into the storage ecosystem. We are
focused on working … to make sure
that’s a very seamless integration and
gives you consistent, global behavior.

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We can also integrate that into business process because, unfortunately, we have to plan for
somebody attacking us. It’s really about how quickly we can detect and respond very quickly to
get the systems back online. You have to plan for the worst-case scenario.
That’s why we have such a big focus on making sure we can detect in real time when
something is happening as the blocks are literally being written to the disk. We can then also
unwind to when we seek a good copy. That’s a huge focus for us right now.
Gardner: When you have a comprehensive data infrastructure, can go global and access data
across all of these different environments, it seems to me that you have set yourself up for a
pervasive analytics capability, which is the gorilla in the room when it comes to digital business
transformation. Denis, how does the IBM Storage vison help bring more pervasive and powerful
analytics to better drive a digital business?
Climb the AI ladder to reach optimal analytics
Kennelly: At the end of the day, that’s what this is all about. It’s about transforming
businesses, to drive analytics, and provide unique insights that help grow your business and
respond to the needs of the marketplace.
It’s all about enabling top-line growth. And that’s only possible when you can have seamless
access to the data very quickly to generate insights literally in real time so you can respond
accordingly to your customer needs and improve customer satisfaction.
This platform is all about discovering that data to drive the analytics. We have a phrase within
IBM, we call it “The AI Ladder.” The first rung on that AI ladder is about discovering and
accessing the data, and then being able to generate models from those analytics that you can
use to respond in your business.
We’re all in a world based on data. And we’re using
it to not only look for new business opportunities but
for optimizing and automating what we already have
today. AI has a major role to play where we can look
at business processes and understand how they are
operating and then, based on analytics and AI, drive
greater automation. That’s a huge focus for us as
well: Not only looking at the new business opportunities but optimizing and automating existing
business processes.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on how consistent and global storage models best propel pervasive
analytics and support digital business transformation.
And we’ve learned how IBM Storage is leveraging containers and the latest storage advances to
deliver inclusive, comprehensive, and actionable data. So please join me in thanking our guest,
Denis Kennelly, General Manager, IBM Storage. Thank you so much, Denis.
Kennelly: Thank you, Dana.
AI has a major role to play where we
can look at business processes and
understand how they are operating
and then, based on analytics and AI,
drive greater automation.

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Gardner: And please look forward to when Denis joins me again for the next discussion in this
three-part series. We’ll delve beneath the covers to learn more about the actual technologies
enabling IBM’s vision for the future of data storage.
A big thank you as well to our audience for joining these BriefingsDirect data strategies insights
discussions. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout
this series of IBM Storage-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next
time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: IBM Storage.
A transcript of a discussion on how consistent global storage models best accelerate and enable
pervasive analytics that support digital business transformation. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2021. All rights reserved.
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