 Winston Edmondson here with Studio B. I'm at IBM Edge 2013 and I've got Richard Swain, a storage specialist with IBM, who's going to fill us in on some of the trends in storage. Richard, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, thank you. So what are you seeing? What are you hearing in the world of stores? Where are things going? Well, I think one of the main things that we're seeing in storage today is definitely flash technology and how it's taking a lot of the older technology is spinning, tape, whatever it is and condensing it down to a smaller footprint, allowing customers to be able to condense racks down into wanting you to use space. I think that's a very disruptive technology and it's enabling people to not only condense, but also save money on administration costs and other things. Have the advances been so prominent that there are no more naysayers? I mean, is it kind of the de facto or are there still some folks that are trying to hold off? Well, the cool thing about IBM is that we have the four portfolio. So some technology may not be on flash, so you need to have something that can put the very things that need to be on flash on flash and then move things around, like our easy tier application. So instead of having a person figuring out, oh, this needs to be on flash, you can actually use a robot, basically that doesn't sleep, it doesn't need to be fed and he can figure out, okay, well, this data is not hot anymore, let's move it down to like our two, three terabyte drives. So when we have customers that are almost doing cartwheels so happy about being able to reduce overhead because they don't need necessarily the staff, they've got systems from IBM that are doing a lot of the thinking and processing for it. Is that what they're talking about? Well, I think it's freeing people up again to do their jobs. Instead of having to worry about, oh, well, I've got someone calling me constantly saying, my database is not performing. They're out there actually looking at new technology and figuring out how do you take your company to the next level? So customers that are considering this and they see the benefits, obviously they're not going to be able to just transform everything overnight. Kind of walk me through what it might look like to make a transformation, maybe a gradual transformation over to some of these new technology. I think the biggest thing that a lot of customers are doing now is virtualization. So getting that virtualization layer in there so that they can move these technologies in non-disruptively, that's a big thing for customers so that as technology changes, we're always changing something new. And the next year it's going to be something else, right? So you've got to have something at a beach head there to allow these technologies to come in and go as needed. Tell me about preparing for the future because you've got some organizations that are willing to make the investment to get where they need to be right now, kind of the latest and greatest they're willing to adopt. But they want to hedge their bets and they don't want that investment to be a waste and then tomorrow or a year from now they have to make another change. What are things that are being done to help maybe for the next 10 years kind of hedge their bets and prepare them for what needs to be done later? I think one of the unique values at IBM is we offer infrastructure studies for people. We come in with our team that is basically isolated from sales, isolated from products and they actually look at what a customer has and they try to help them build a plan for the next not two years, but five, 10 years and figuring out, okay, here is a plan to move you forward into that and it's not based on technology, it's not based on a product, it's based on business processes and it's solving that business process. Let's talk to some of the folks that are familiar, they're hearing some of the rumblings about Flash but maybe they, from what they hear it sounds like more of a trend and if they want to be trendy, yeah, they can adopt it. Let's talk about some hardcore, I mean some actual benefits. Any case studies that you can talk about that can really demonstrate how moving towards Flash will make a clear benefit? I think one of the clear benefits is in the database world. So one of the things that Flash allows databases is to give a response back a lot quicker and being able to respond quickly to a database means that you have fewer cycles on a system. So you think of Flash as being storage but in reality it's a server play. So we talk to our server people about, look, you may have a system that's overloaded now and putting Flash in you can get these responses back so you don't have to burn so many CPU cycles. So it's really unique that we're talking to more server and database people about Flash than storage people. Is this what is enabling some of the close to real-time big data analysis where you're able to really crunch and get access to meaningful information and then use it quickly. Is Flash what's kind of enabling some of these huge? Most definitely. But Flash in big data is very important. Getting that data and crunching it down, like you said, in a very quick time and then executing it off in something else. So as your streams are coming in, you're crunching it down and then as the data becomes less important, it might be a day or two, you move it off to two terabyte, three terabyte, even off to the cloud if you'd like. So that Flash layer is very important in big data to get those responses back. I know that you always have your finger on the pulse of storage. You know what's happening before a lot of these folks know it. It's almost like you're psychic. You can predict these things. So for the folks that want to follow along with you, are you tweeting? How can people follow and take advantage of your knowledge? Great, so I do have a Twitter account and also write a blog for IBM called The Storage Tank. You can find me at The Storage Tank, just Google anything. Also, I write unstructured data or NAS. Website for IBM as well. Perfect. Winston Edmondson with Richard Swain, Studio B, checking out.