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IBM Leads Team to Alleviate Data Storage Woes
Kailash Nadh writes to tell us ABC News is reporting that IBM is teaming up with several other companies to form a group called Aperi. This group will attempt to "push the open source idea deeper into computing" and "free up the bottlenecks that can occur when a business has bought tape and disk storage systems from a variety of vendors." The partnership is to include companies like Cisco, Sun, Fujitsu, and several others.
EOM
No Sigs!
http://fr.sys-con.com/read/145401.htm
No Sigs!
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5912912.html
So many people don't read the articles anymore that the submitter must have figured, "Screw it, why post it anyway?"
Companies channel their "news". And who else could bring us better entertainment than ABC News, a Disney channel? The whole idea that IBM is pushing Linux is just too funny. IBM has no interest in Linux. IBM wants to sell their stuff. Nothing wrong with that, but why do we need IBM between the Open Source community and customers who already bought their equipment? It is the good old strategy of putting yourself between the brain and the money. All distributors of entertainment industry work that way. So, let's welcome IBM in their new role as entertainer, with Disney as partner.
The Tape ARchive tool, reports IBM, will allow users to add and remove files from a data set, called a 'tarfile', via a well-documented API, which IBM wants OSS developers to leverage. This 'tarfile' can be created as a regular Unix or Wintel filesystem file, or directly written to tape or disk. This can be used to create any number of GUI and command line tools to provide low-level access to the data files contained within. A bonus to the extensible format used by IBM is that native Compress, GZ and BZ2 compression libraries can be used, when available on the system. A beta release of the utility set ALSO provides LZIP compression, previously only available as a Sourceforge patch to the existing OSS toolkit.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Kailash Nadh writes to tell us ABC News is reporting that IBM is teaming up with several other companies to form a group called Aperi. This group will attempt to "push the open source idea deeper into computing" and "free up the bottlenecks that can occur when a business has bought tape and disk storage systems from a variety of vendors." The partnership is to include companies like Cisco, Sun, Fujitsu, and several others.
IBM can make this sort of a play because it has such a wide array of services and a support arm that is right in the trenches. So, for example, it can see that its UNIX gear is selling well, but a lot of IBM's UNIX customers are opting for EMC storage. IBM's service arm is happy to set that up for you, but its sales arm is not nearly as happy. So IBM gets to work at making storage a commodity and then providing service, support, and hardware. This is a win for IBM because it no longer needs EMC's help to sell an IBM solution. The profit that used to go into EMC's pocket now goes into IBM's pocket. The margins probably aren't as large as EMC used to get, but IBM doesn't have to share. IBM is more than happy to shrink the size of a market that it happens to compete in if it thinks that it can get a bigger slice of the pie or more service revenue. Interestingly enough, commoditizing a market usually causes it to grow because more people can afford the good or service. By creating a commodity IBM can often finagle both a bigger market *and* a larger slice of the pie.
The best part is that this sort of strategy doesn't necessarily mean that IBM has to give up its current data storage products. With a little bit of differentiation IBM might still be able to sell "high end" storage gear that works well with their specialty OSes and hardware while offering a lower-cost standards-based solution that competes favorably with IBM's competitors. Just because IBM is pushing Linux certainly hasn't made its AIX business go away. Just like Linux gives IBM more ammunition when competing with Microsoft commodity storage gives IBM more ammunition when competing with EMC.
This also goes to show how the folks at IBM are much smarter than the folks at Sun. Sun was facing the same problem as IBM in the storage arena (people wanted EMC's gear instead of Sun's gear). Sun is trying to remedy that through the purchase of another storage vendor (StorageTek) that is likewise having trouble competing. IBM, on the other hand, has opted to kick the bottom out of the market and see if it can't dominate over a commodity storage field.