IBM promotes Open Standards "WA" (Harmony) in Tokyo
idg.net
A senior IBM Corp. executive on Monday laid down a challenge to the storage
industry to work together toward interoperability as a prime goal and pledged that
IBM would "do everything in its power to help develop the technology and
relationships to making interoperability a reality."
Calling proprietary standards futile, Linda Sanford, senior vice president of IBM's
storage group, told the Storage Networking World conference held in Tokyo that the
industry needs to come together to avoid impeding the growth of the electronic
commerce industry.
Her comments come as IBM is busy working on a new storage networking system
called Storage Tank that has open standards at its heart.
When fully developed, she said, Storage Tank will create a universal file system.
This will lead to the creation of a "reservoir of storage capacity and stored data -- a
single pool of virtualized storage that will be universally accessible across any
platform."
"Ultimately, such a universal file system will eliminate the need for data to flow
from that file server, to the database server, to the application server, to the web
server and finally to the Web browser. That's the intention," said Sanford. "Why not
let the end user just access the data directly when he or she is authenticated?"
It is not difficult to see why IBM is making such aggressive moves in the storage
sector. During her speech, Sanford cited analysts' estimates that within three years
spending at major companies on storage will be three times that on computer
hardware, one of IBM's mainstays, as a result of the ever-increasing amount of
data being generated. "Analysts predict that the world will produce more data in the
next three years than all of the rest of human history combined," she said.
But to realize this vision, the company has to win over the support of the industry
and convince customers such open standards are worth supporting.
"There is one key obstacle in our path to storage nirvana, and that is the lack of
interoperability that we all impose on our customers today." The various vendors all
have different storage networking systems that do not work together, Sanford said.
"We, as an industry, must remove these obstacles. We must achieve
interoperability. The way that we do this, we all know, is through open standards,"
she said.
"When you hear IBM spreading the gospel of open computing, you may think
that's not the old IBM you have known -- and you're right. Now, there's an old
saying in our country that the worst sinners are the best repenters," Sanford said.
"At IBM today, we believe that the promise of e-business can only be filled through
open standards, and everything that we do now is based on this philosophy. IBM
will not dictate the future of storage, but neither will EMC (Corp.) or any single
company."
IBM, in Armonk, New York, can be reached via the Web at ibm.com. |
