IBM at VMware Explore 2025

In this session, we'll showcase the many ways that you can simplify and accelerate storage management tasks when using IBM FlashSystem for your VCF storage. From fast VM snapshots, at-a-glance performance monitoring and near-instant alerting on ransomware threats, spend a few minutes learning with us and save yourself hours every week!

Planning capacity doesn’t have to be a guessing game or an endless spreadsheet exercise. In this session, discover how IBM Turbonomic transforms capacity planning from reactive to proactive. Using real-time supply-demand analytics, Turbonomic delivers precise insights into when you'll need more resources, whether to invest in hardware, or when workloads should move to cloud — all while assuring application performance. Walk away knowing how to turn capacity planning into a strategic advantage, not a fire drill.

Explore the latest advancements in IBM Storage Ceph integrations with VMware solutions. This session highlights new features, enhanced workflows, and best practices for leveraging Ceph with VMware. Attendees will gain insights into the roadmap, upcoming capabilities, and strategic approaches to maximize performance, scalability, and reliability in modern data center deployments.

Speak to how the needs of AI—footprint to add servers, capacity of data that needs to be processed, power required by GPU servers and other factors—need to be understood ahead of time. How will your organization meet these?

They need to reduce backspace to house new GPU servers (FlashSystem footprint smallest in the industry). They need to provide more capacity to be processed by using analytics and AI (FlashSystems has the densest footprint in the industry). They need to reduce power consumption to provide the necessary power for GPU servers (FlashSystems have the lowest power draw in the industry).

The conversation covers both what it is and how we actually do this. As costs become higher in the VMWare world, other lower-cost factors need to come to fruition to help offset these cost increases. One of these might be the number of individuals required to run storage.

Once virtualized, IBM FlashSystems can provide a single GUI across nearly all block storage. If the organization has 3 people managing storage, now they need only one. What do you do with the leftover previous storage managers, fire them?

No. Repurpose them into modern workloads to make the organization more robust, modern and profitable with focuses on things like AI, ML, IOT, analytics and more.

Why fight fires when you can prevent them? VMware monitoring tools show you problems; Turbonomic prevents them. Learn how Turbonomic’s real-time analytics engine continuously takes the right actions — from resizing to placement to storage optimization — preventing performance risks before they occur. Explore real-world examples of how enterprises moved from reactive troubleshooting to autonomous operations — boosting both reliability and efficiency.

IBM is a 100% Partner Ecosystem-driven company.That means empowering resellers, consulting and services firms, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to boost their competitiveness by offering IBM solutions — or embedding IBM technology into their own offerings.From Automation to Storage and IBM Cloud, IBM Partner Plus provides the tools, education, incentives, and support you need to grow your client portfolio and expand your market presence.Join us to learn how you can take advantage of IBM’s partner program to drive new business opportunities and accelerate your success.

Legacy storage systems are siloed and purpose-built, requiring diverse and disparate skillsets, as well as high cost to acquire and maintain. Ultimately this model leads to vendor lock-in and inefficient use of resources and budget. IBM Storage Ceph is an enterprise-grade software-defined storage solution with a three-in-one architecture that unifies block, file and object data in a single highly scalable and resilient distributed solution that simplifies your infrastructure stack while enabling a lower total cost of ownership. Come see Storage Ceph’s VMWare integrations and catch a sneak peek at what’s to come with our Technical Product Manager Mike Burkhart.

The speed of discovery of a ransomware attack is of the upmost importance to limit the amount of damage that can occur. Learn how IBM uses the power of computational storage and advanced AI models to detect ransomware as it’s written, taking your recovery speed from days to minutes. 

See how integrations with VMware can alert you directly in vCenter and other security applications across your entire VMware estate.

Your applications don’t care whether they run on VMs or containers — they care about performance. In this session, learn how IBM Turbonomic delivers unified resource management across VMware and OpenShift. By continuously matching workload demand to infrastructure supply, Turbonomic optimizes both virtual machines and Kubernetes pods, ensuring performance while controlling costs. Say goodbye to silos between DevOps and Infrastructure teams — and hello to truly hybrid operations.

Are you paying for cores you don’t need? Oracle, SQL, Java™, ERP, CRM and core-based licensing costs can skyrocket if workloads are oversized. In this session, learn how Turbonomic not only ensures performance but actively optimizes VM placements and resource allocations to minimize your licensing footprint. See how customers reduce software costs by up to 30% while maintaining compliance and performance—a win for both IT and finance.

Speak to how the needs of AI—footprint to add servers, capacity of data that needs to be processed, power required by GPU servers and other factors—need to be understood ahead of time. How will your organization meet these? They need to reduce backspace to house new GPU servers (FlashSystem footprint smallest in the industry). They need to provide more capacity to be processed by using analytics and AI (FlashSystems has the densest footprint in the industry). They need to reduce power consumption to provide the necessary power for GPU servers (FlashSystems have the lowest power draw in the industry). The conversation covers both what it is and how we actually do this. As costs become higher in the VMWare world, other lower-cost factors need to come to fruition to help offset these cost increases. One of these might be the number of individuals required to run storage. Once virtualized, IBM FlashSystems can provide a single GUI across nearly all block storage. If the organization has 3 people managing storage, now they need only one. What do you do with the leftover previous storage managers, fire them? No. Repurpose them into modern workloads to make the organization more robust, modern and profitable with focuses on things like AI, ML, IOT, analytics and more.

Cyberthreats are getting more sophisticated and pervasive, making it more important than ever for organizations to prioritize resilience so that they can quickly recover to a minimum viable company following a disruptive event. In this session, we show how IBM Storage Defender delivers capabilities to manage data resilience across your entire data estate—including primary arrays as well as secondary and tertiary storage—covering all your data copies and across all your VMware workloads.

You can also learn about the Storage Defender ability to intelligently detect anomalies and cyberthreats and help you recover quickly and safely in the event of a malware attack. 

VM sprawl and overprovisioning are silent killers of IT efficiency. Join this session to see how IBM Turbonomic uses real-time analytics to continuously right-size VMware workloads. Whether your challenge is idle CPU, oversized memory or inefficient storage allocation, Turbonomic identifies and automates the right actions—including resizing, VM placement and storage moves. The result? Lower costs, fewer tickets and optimal performance—with no manual guesswork.

In this session, you can learn how to deploy a cyber resilient storage network, applying a secure by design configuration that includes quantum safe cryptography and federated authentication, making it the top network choice for mission-critical IBM Storage solutions. IBM b-type storage networks, using Brocade technology, have integrated security, delivering a strong line of defense to protect your organization’s valuable digital assets. With the increased sophistication and volume of cybercriminal activities, protecting your data is a critical part of today’s overall business strategy. Businesses that run on data and a distributed workforce are under immense pressure to protect their enterprise users against disruptions or outages while eliminating cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Are you seeking to modernize your VMware infrastructure, reduce storage costs and gain unparalleled scalability and flexibility? This session explores how IBM® Storage Ceph®, an enterprise-grade software-defined storage solution with a three-in-one architecture, empowers VMware environments with enterprise-grade block, file and object storage from a single, highly scalable and resilient distributed solution that simplifies your infrastructure stack. 

We delve into the practical benefits of integrating Storage Ceph with VMware vSphere, including leveraging NVMe/TCP to deliver high-performance block storage for your most demanding VMware workloads, decoupling VM storage from ESX compute nodes for greater flexibility and potential cost savings.

We also look to how the Storage Ceph Plugin for vSphere streamlines provisioning and management of VMFS datastores directly within your familiar vSphere Client, simplifying day-to-day operations. Finally, we look to how Storage Ceph's distributed, self-healing and self-managing architecture provides a highly elastic and reliable storage experience, allowing you to start small and scale to petabytes, without disruption.

This session is ideal for architects, administrators and IT leaders looking to optimize their virtualization strategy with cutting-edge software-defined storage.

IBM is a 100% partner ecosystem-driven company. That means empowering resellers, consulting and services firms, and independent software vendors (ISVs) to boost their competitiveness by offering IBM solutions—or embedding IBM technology into their own offerings.

From automation to storage and IBM Cloud, IBM Partner Plus provides the tools, education, incentives and support you need to grow your client portfolio and expand your market presence.

Join us to learn how you can take advantage of IBM’s partner program to drive new business opportunities and accelerate your success.

Modern applications don’t live in just VMs anymore—Kubernetes and containers are part of the stack. But VMware-native tools treat them as separate worlds.

In this session, learn how Turbonomic bridges VMware and Kubernetes, continuously optimizing resources across VMs and containers in a single policy engine. Discover how customers improve application performance, reduce cloud waste and eliminate silos between infrastructure and DevOps teams.

In today’s threat-laden digital landscape, enterprises demand storage systems that not only deliver extreme performance but also offer robust protection against cyberthreats and ransomware. IBM® Flash Storage rises to this challenge by integrating advanced cyber resilience directly into its architecture. Leveraging technologies such as Safeguarded Copy, immutable snapshots and WORM (write once read many) capabilities, IBM FlashSystem ensures data integrity and prevents unauthorized modification or deletion, even during active cyberincidents. With AI-driven anomaly detection, secure multifactor authentication and seamless integration with security information and event management (SIEM) systems, it provides early threat identification and automated response mechanisms. Also, its support for air-gapped logical isolation, rapid recovery and automated failover ensures minimal downtime and quick restoration of critical operations. IBM Flash Storage doesn’t just store data—it protects, recovers and sustains business continuity, making it a foundational element of a truly cyber resilient enterprise IT infrastructure. Hence, it’s the most cyber resilient storage for VCF.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is the modern platform for delivering a consistent, secure,
and flexible private cloud experience. As organizations scale their VCF workloads, the
underlying storage must keep pace — delivering low latency, high throughput, and seamless
scalability. IBM FlashSystem grid brings next-generation scale-out block storage capabilities
to VCF, enabling enterprises to run mission-critical workloads with uncompromising
performance and resiliency.

In today’s always-on digital landscape, organizations must be prepared to restore virtual machines (VMs) at scale—quickly, safely, and reliably. This session explores the latest advancements in backup and recovery technologies that enable IT teams to achieve fast, safe, and mass restoration of VMs. Attendees will learn how IBM Storage Defender manages recovery points, enforce protection SLAs, and delivers automated, verifiable recovery testing to guarantee data integrity and compliance. Whether you manage a handful of VMs or thousands, this session provides actionable insights and best practices for building a resilient, efficient, and secure VM recovery strategy using state-of-the-art backup solutions.

VMware DRS keeps workloads balanced, but is balancing enough? In this session, learn how IBM Turbonomic delivers next-generation resource management by going beyond simple cluster balancing.

Turbonomic continuously optimizes compute, storage and network together—at the VM, host and datastore level—ensuring peak application performance without overprovisioning. Discover how enterprises eliminate manual tuning, prevent performance risks and drive up to 30% cost savings, all while extending their VMware investments.

Join us for an exciting session exploring the latest advancements in IBM Storage Ceph 8.1. This session will focus on the significant enhancements to NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP), a critical protocol for improving storage performance and reducing latency. Our experts can guide you through the new features and optimizations introduced, including seamless integration with VMware environments through the updated VMware plug-in.

We also present comprehensive performance testing results, showcasing the real-world benefits of NVMe/TCP in enterprise storage estates. Attendees can gain insights into best practices for leveraging these advancements to maximize performance, scalability and reliability in modern IT infrastructures.

Monitoring is not managing. VMware environments are increasingly complex and manual actions can’t keep up. This session explores how IBM Turbonomic drives true automation—not just alerts—at enterprise scale. See how analytical actions like VM resizing, placement, storage optimization and scaling are executed automatically, ensuring both performance and efficiency. No scripts. No guesswork. Just continuous optimization that scales with you.

Cyberthreats are getting more sophisticated and pervasive, making it more important than ever for organizations to prioritize resilience so that they can quickly recover to a minimum viable company following a disruptive event. In this session, we show how IBM Storage Defender delivers capabilities to manage data resilience across your entire data estate—including primary arrays as well as secondary and tertiary storage—covering all your data copies and across all your VMware workloads. You can also learn about the Storage Defender ability to intelligently detect anomalies and cyberthreats and help you recover quickly and safely in the event of a malware attack.

IBM is a 100% Partner Ecosystem-driven company.
That means empowering resellers, consulting and services firms, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to boost their competitiveness by offering IBM solutions — or embedding IBM technology into their own offerings.
From Automation to Storage and IBM Cloud, IBM Partner Plus provides the tools, education, incentives, and support you need to grow your client portfolio and expand your market presence.
Join us to learn how you can take advantage of IBM’s partner program to drive new business opportunities and accelerate your success.

In this session you will learn how to deploy a Cyber Resilient storage network, applying secure by design configuration which includes Quantum Safe cryptography and Federated Authentication, making it the top network choice for mission-critical IBM Storage solutions. IBM b-type Storage Networks, using Brocade technology, have integrated security, delivering a strong line of defense to protect your organization’s valuable digital assets.  With the increased sophistication and volume of cyber-criminal activities, protecting your data is a critical part of today’s overall business strategy. Businesses that run on data and a distributed workforce are under immense pressure to protect their enterprise users against disruptions or outages while eliminating cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Running VMware on-prem and workloads in the cloud? You’re not alone — but are you optimizing them together? This session explores how IBM Turbonomic provides a single decision engine that continuously assures performance while controlling costs across VMware, AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes. Learn how customers make data-driven decisions on whether to run workloads on-prem or in the cloud, and how Turbonomic automates resource actions to maximize efficiency across the hybrid environment.