Day 1 at IBM Tech Fest

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I am always blown away with the expertise and insight our Advanced Technical Services team displays.  They are our “Go To” guys for driving technology to our field teams and they are the last resort before getting into a development team.  For me, they are a well of information and experience that I can use to help build solutions.  

Today, I am sitting in the SONAS system training with Mark Taylor.  Mark and I have been working together at IBM for a few years and I have the most respect for him.  Mark is responsible for supporting the N series and SONAS at IBM along with a few other team members.  He has is known for being a stickler on our solution assurance calls and is always finding solutions for our clients.

Our mission this week is to learn more about storage products on a deeper level.  Many of the technical sales group has specialty that they focus on. It could be XiV, SONAS, Mid-Tier storage, what ever.  This week, when we leave on Friday, we should come away as more rounded technical experts. 

I am still amazed at the SONAS product and how powerful it really is, especially compared to other products in the market place.  I find it hard to compare to other brands due to great feature set it brings and integration with TSM.  No other storage out there is able to provide unstructured NAS data a platform to live on from cradle to grave like SOANS.  

This mimics how IBM is doing more solution selling in the marketplace.  Our Storage team is partnering with the POWER team and the Software teams to provide customers with a ‘one stop’ solution.  If you look just at the SONAS product, it has multiple components all from IBM; X series servers, TSM and GPFS software, XiV storage.  We are finding that if we combine these products into a solution based product, customers can solve more issues with the same amount of dollars.  I believe this is the future of IBM storage and storage in general.

SONAS does have a couple of points that I would like to see cleaned up.  One is the GUI, and the other is its policy writer.  From what I can tell, the information in the SONAS GUI is very similar to that of the XiV system.  It just has a different look and feel.  With the Storwize V7000 getting the ‘XiV’ look and feel, I suspect future releases of SONAS might get the same treatment.  As for the policy engine, it’s all based on SQL Query language.  If you know how to write it then it’s not an issue but there are some out there that might not be privy to such skills.  There are some guidelines and examples that can be used to help setup the policies like moving data from one pool to the next but I suspect people will rely more on their Technical Advisor to help define those rules.

Tomorrow is all about protect tier.  I am excited about the hands on and finding how this box can really save people space with their backups.