 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here at wikibond.org headquarters. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of all things tech, enterprise tech. We bring you the smartest people we can find, the smartest nodes out there. We extract the signal from the noise and package it and provide it to you, our audience. Thanks very much for watching. We're here today with Ed Walsh, who's the vice president within IBM's storage division. He runs the portfolio strategy. Ed, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to be back. So Ed, we hear a lot about Smarter at IBM, Smarter Planet. We saw the integrated systems announcement that Steve Mills made several weeks ago. What's Smarter Storage? We're hearing a lot about that these days. Right, so it's a natural extension from Smarter Planet to Smarter Computing. It's really our approach to designing and deploying storage infrastructure. So what is it? Yeah, so basically it's three core tenants that you can look to IBM in their storage that we're putting into all of our products, but also where we're investing, where we're announcing, in fact, with Smarter Storage and also where we're going with it. We're doing a lot of statement and direction showing you where we're going with the portfolio. But the three tenants are Smarter Storage is efficient by design, Smarter Storage is self-optimizing, and Smarter Storage is clad agile. Okay, so efficient by design. Sounds good. What does it mean? Yeah, pretty straightforward and simple. But basically it's a, you know, Smarter Storage should help you deal with the cost and complexity and also just the capacity that you're seeing in your environment. Are there products associated with efficient by design? So again, I can talk about the entire portfolio. So if you talk about it from disc or tape, I can talk about the V7000, DS8000, XIV, specifically one product that would be high level, which is something that only IBM has would be our real-time compression. What we've done is actually taken compression technology and allow it to not have the downsides or the optimization issues with performance. So what you can do is a software key, turn on compression, get two to five times more storage out of your production, fiber-general environment, without any performance degradation. That's something that's 35 patents, a lot of engineering, and no one else in the industry has. So, okay, how about self-optimizing? Let's talk about that a little bit. Drill down, give us again examples if you could. Again, I could go across the different technologies, but the biggest trend right now is Flash Optimize Infrastructure. So Flash is everywhere in the storage infrastructure. It's at the server level, the network level, or end of the storage level. And across our storage portfolio, they're all Flash Optimize from a disparate perspective. Of course, we have tape products as well that would be optimized, but when we're talking about Flash Optimization, our entire disk portfolio. The key thing is how to coordinate the cache. So if you're caching a server, the network and the storage simultaneously, how do you coordinate that for efficiency? You don't wanna double-cache things, but more importantly for actually data availability. What you don't wanna do is have a virtual machine fail from one server to another, and you're caching locally in the server, and literally you have either a stale read or a stale write, which is a corruption. So it's a coordination that we're doing. So what you saw us is actually show how we've extended Easy Tier, which is our tiering up to Saucid Disk on the storage layer, and extend it into both using either network or PCI cards, standard PCI cards in any server platform. Okay, now in Cloud Agile, is there infrastructure associated with Cloud Agile? Good one. So again, I could go through our portfolio and show you where we're working in cloud technologies and robustness that we're talking about with Cloud Agile. But I would put in general, the best one would be PureFlex. You mentioned the Expert Integrated System announcement we made in April. The industry is looking for private cloud, and basically what they're asking for is, can you help me consolidate my environment, have a single way to manage it, give me agility across my environment? What the industry responded with, which I'll call private cloud version 1.0, was how to consolidate your VMware and only VMware infrastructure. And typically when I'm in environment, I said, well, how many people have VMware and everyone raises their hand, almost everyone? And I said, but how many people only have VMware? And literally it's crickets, almost nobody. So what IBM has done, which is smarter, but it's our PureFlex system, is basically integrate that you can integrate your environment, which is, yes, VMware, but also other virtualization platforms like Hyper-V, Zen, and PowerVM, but also physical workloads like Linux or AIX, as well as Microsoft platforms. It also can do both x86, but also power platforms. And bring that together with systems, virtualization, applications, a network, and storage all together. And smarter storage is part of that package built in. But what you're able to get is what you're really vast for. Help me get my private cloud, I'll call it private cloud 2.0. How do you bring it together under one roof, one management, and only IBM's delivering that right now? It's actually very difficult to do, but again, only IBM is able to deliver that. Well, it's hard because there's a lot of diversity. And my understanding is you guys have codified a lot of the knowledge that you've had in your field engagements. All right, well, good. Well, thanks for taking us through smarter storage. It kind of completes the picture at IBM. It sure does. And a piece of the mosaic that fits in. Check the Wiki. We've got a bunch of analysis on these and other announcements, so please do that. And Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Okay, everybody. That's it for now. Keep watching for more information from SiliconANGLE.tv and Wikibon. Thank you.