by Joh Toigo – June 6, 2018
Usually, I don’t expect such candor from industry insiders, but I was delighted to hear Calline Sanchez, one of my favorite IBM execs, confirm what I already suspected. The current disinterest among many IT consumers with physical infrastructure, including storage, is wildly mistaken.
I had been questioning my career after traveling to Silicon Valley just prior to attending the IBM THINK conference last Fall. There, I had heard stories about the “irrelevance” of storage in the new world of clouds and software-defined everything. For Pete’s sake, an up and coming programming model, Containers, doesn’t even provide a way to save data from apps that are created and operated in this form. In a world where everything is ephemeral, why save any data at all?
I wasn’t buying it, and I was getting ornery by the time that the plane landed in Vegas for THINK 2017. Fortunately, I connected with Calline, Vice President for Enterprise Storage at Big Blue, and she set me straight. She had many insightful comments to offer, but I especially liked the reference to TP.
Here is my vblog of our chat.
Thank you to Calline Sanchez, and to IBM, for inviting me to the event and for the Social Media Influencer pass. It was a great show and I enjoyed the interviews, which I am posting here. By the way, storage is like toilet paper: most folks tend not to think about it until its gone.
