Software Defined Storage (SDS) -- the fever catches on!

IBM recently announced an overhaul of their go-to-market strategy for storage. Several of the existing products have been packaged together under the IBM Spectrum umbrella. Overall, it does have the sound bytes of an "old wine in new bottle" --  the part that stood out to me was the Spectrum Accelerate announcement, in which their premier storage array product XIV is going to be also available as software only! XIV has been the cash cow for IBM, and certainly a bold move to cannibalize a high margin hardware offering! The move certainly makes a lot of sense, given XIV's highly scalable, shared nothing internal architecture -- having worked on XIV since the acquisition in 2008, it was definitely ahead of its time, and I have great respect of this product!

Close on the heels of the IBM announcement, SolidFire also jumped in the SDS bandwagon with a similar software-based offering of their product.

I think its very clear that the broader storage industry is recognizing the broader opportunity with SDS, even if it translates to cannibalizing the hardware-based margins in the short-run. I wouldn't be surprised if there are similar announcements across the board, with eventually every existing storage array also being available in a software-only version (certainly not trivial to accomplish, and won`t happen overnight given the exponential complexity introduced by the hardware qualification permutations).

To sum it up, SDS is a classic example of the "Innovators Dilemma!"