Author: mesabigroup

The mainframe — namely the IBM Z platform — has, does, and will continue to play an essential and irreplaceable role in IT infrastructures across the world’s economy. As with any complete IT implementation, an IBM Z on-premises (where the premises can be geographically distributed as necessary) private cloud consists of closely integrated compute, storage, […]

On the classic Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life if a contestant accidently said the “secret word” of the day, he or she would win a prize. There’s no prize included in this commentary, but the secret word of the day is virtualization, especially as it relates to IBM’s new HPC and AI […]

IBM’s new storage-related announcements focus heavily on the FlashSystem portion of its all-flash storage portfolio which has as its foundation the FlashSystem 900. That includes the FlashSystem 900 itself, a standalone 2U rack solution for tier 0 application acceleration, the FlashSystem V9000 for traditional tier 1 enterprise-class applications, and the FlashSystem A9000/FlashSystem A9000R for cloud-based, […]

Altaro provides virtual machine (VM) backup for small and mid-market (SME) companies (those with less than a thousand employees) that typically cannot afford the deep and robust IT organizations that large enterprises have at their disposal. Still, these businesses must keep up with the latest IT initiatives, including the move to virtual machines (VMs) (notably […]

Dell EMC has long demonstrated its leadership in data protection and continues to extend that role with data protection offerings for the software-defined data center (SDDC) — notably, those data centers under the aegis of the VMware family of products. Dell EMC Data Protection Suite Family But before we get into the company’s latest product […]

IBM’s public announcement that external storage systems revenue grew by 7% in Q1 2017 and 8% in Q2 2017 reverses an ongoing downward trend. Now, past performance is no predictor of future performance as famous financial disclaimers always state. However, this is excellent news for IBM, especially since it does not seem to be a […]

Archiving data from mainframe storage systems has been traditionally limited to an on premises physical or virtual tape tier. However, IBM has overcome that limitation with the introduction of Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT) software that runs on DS8880 storage systems for z Systems. TCT widens the archiving storage targets to cloud environments and that brings […]

Telecommunications-gear giant Ericsson was adversely affected economically in 2016 by slow capital spending on network upgrades and expansion among telecom carriers. Even though mobile data usage is growing exponentially that has not translated into wireless providers’ sales growth. As a result, cost disciplines, albeit painful, have resulted in necessary budget cutting. However, cutting alone does […]

IBM Edge is the company’s annual systems conference with a focus on servers (namely z Systems and POWER) and storage solutions. As you well know, such a conference is an immersive experience with the overwhelming amount of information that is presented within a few days. As an industry analyst with a strong focus on storage, […]

IBM continues to play a key leadership role in two trends that are transforming computer storage — software-defined storage (SDS) and all-flash storage systems. This week’s Q3 storage announcement focused on IBM’s virtualization-driven SDS product, IBM Spectrum Virtualize, both as standalone software and in its powering IBM’s all-flash solutions. Those include the FlashSystem V9000, the […]