In this storage supplier profile, we look at IBM, which has perhaps the longest history of all the storage players, and in IT much more widely, in servers, services and the cloud.
We find the company well set on its ongoing efforts to reorient after a period of declining revenues. That reorientation manifests itself as a strong embrace with the cloud, containerisation and as-a-service modes of purchase.
In this article, we look at IBM, its origins, its key storage products, and its approach to the cloud, containers and consumption models of storage purchasing.
IBM is a giant among corporations in general, in IT, and in storage.
It was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. That was clearly a bit of a mouthful, so it changed its name to International Business Machines in 1924. It became a leader in punch card recording systems, and later electric typewriters, calculators and other office machinery.
From the 1960s, it was core to the roots of modern IT, and led the way in mainframe and personal computing. Having been a pioneer in the PC market, it started to slide against emerging players, and thus got out of consumer products to focus on the enterprise.
A huge and more recent shift for IBM was its acquisition of Red Hat for $34bn in 2019. That brought the Red Hat portfolio of Linux, and cloud- and container-focused products Ceph and OpenStack, to IBM and showed the company had put a big bet on the cloud.
How does IBM rank against other storage players?
In 2023, according to IDC’s external storage system revenues, IBM was eighth in terms of market share (4.7%) and revenue of $1.468bn. That was a shade behind Hitachi, which recorded £1.554bn and a 4.9% share. Above those two are – in rank order – Dell, Huawei, HPE, Lenovo, NetApp and Pure Storage.
Eighth position marks a further relative decline by IBM in terms of revenues and market share. In the second quarter of 2021, IDC ranked IBM joint-fifth among storage array makers, also with market share of 4.7%. In 2022, it was seventh, with 4.4% share and revenue of $1.396bn.
IBM is in a state of relative long-term decline against other companies, including in tech.
In 1980, IBM was the eighth-largest US company in the Fortune 500, with no other tech company in the top 30. By 2023, it ranked 65th, with many tech companies ahead of it, including Amazon and Apple. In 2024, it had crept up the rankings a little to 63rd.
IBM revenue has been on a downward trend over the past two decades, with averages of around $90bn from the turn of the millennium to around 2007, and reaching $106bn in 2011. It has declined since then – down to around $55bn in 2020 – but with a little bounce back to $62.7bn for 2024.
But it’s still a giant. At year-end 2024-2025, IBM turned over $62.83bn in revenue and had around 277,000 employees. That’s down from 466,995 in 2012. In the UK, IBM currently has 21,000 employees and 125 offices.
What are IBM’s key storage products?
IBM Storage FlashSystem arrays come in the 5000, 5200, 7300 and 9500 series, with media available in combinations of of HDD, 2.5” SSD flash and NVMe. Capacities increase from about 0.5PB in the 5000 series to 4.5PB in the 9500, as does controller central processing unit performance.
IBM added the C200 to this family in early 2025. It comes with higher capacity QLC flash drives and is aimed at archive use cases and sequential input/output.
Block storage is the focus, with iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity.
All FlashSystem arrays have connectivity to public clouds for data tiering, migration, replication and snapshots. That functionality comes as part of IBM’s Storage Virtualize operating environment, which all these products run.
IBM’s Storage DS8000 family of flash storage is targeted at customers with IBM zSystem mainframe systems (via FICON) and IBM i (formerly Power) servers (via Fibre Channel).
The two model sub-lines are the entry and midrange DS8A10 with3.69PB maximum capacity, plus the DS8A50 with up to 7.37PB capacity. All offer minimum access time of 80µs, or 13µs with the mainframe-optimised zHyperLink connection.
IBM claims eight nines availability for DS8000 arrays. They come with full data encryption, immutable copies – Safeguarded Copy – to protect against ransomware, automated tiering and disaster recovery functionality. Other features include hybrid cloud connectivity, a number of deep integrations with IBM server and mainframe operating systems, and container storage via CSI.
IBM Storage Scale is the company’s scale-out storage for file and object. It is based on Storage Scale hardware appliance nodes that can scale from a few tens of TB to yottabytes, with millions of IOPS per node and throughput into the low hundreds of GBps. On the software side it runs IBM’s Spectrum Scale / General Parallel File System and can give object access and tiering via OpenStack Swift and S3 APIs.
It is targeted at unstructured data and AI/ML workloads and for deployments that can build clusters across wide geographical areas. Storage media supported include spinning disk HDDs and NVMe SSDs. Connectivity is via 100Gbps Ethernet and Infiniband.
IBM Storage Fusion integrates compute, storage and networking into a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) system that comes with the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes application platform.
IBM is a long-standing player in tape, with tape, tape management and virtual tape library products up to the latest LTO-10 standard in its TS series range.
Many IBM storage products are also available as software, including Storage Fusion, Storage Scale, Storage Ceph (block, file and object storage aimed at AI workloads), Storage Insights AIOps, Storage Protect protection, and Storage Defender which can combine with Storage Protect, FlashSystem’s Safeguarded Copy, Storage Fusion and Cohesity’s DataProtect. IBM QRadar is the company’s ransomware discovery and recovery product family.
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is a long-standing component in IBM’s offer, and was known as SAN Volume Controller or SVC. It is a block storage virtualisation system that can allow storage hardware from multiple vendors to talk to each other as well as to storage in the cloud. It also offers advanced storage services such as snapshots, replication and storage tiering.
What markets and workloads does IBM target?
IBM is huge, with a very broad range of storage products. It has the capability to deliver storage for any workload from block storage at entry level and mid-range to massive capacity and performance and mainframe connectivity. It is one of two storage vendors with the latter capability, alongside Hitach Vantara. As with other IT and storage vendors, key focuses currently are on AI use cases, flash storage, hybrid cloud, and cloud-native applications and containerisation.
How is the role of the cloud in the IBM offer?
IBM has bet heavily on the cloud storage, in hybrid- and multi-cloud modes. Key to this strategy is use of Red Hat Ceph and OpenShift as a platform that leans heavily on use of containers and cloud native applications in cloud environments.
The company is perhaps unique among array vendors in having its own hyperscaler-style public cloud with services for block, file and object storage modes that can be used with its cloud servers or bare metal compute.
Cloud File Storage, which provides NFS file shares from 10GB to 32TB with customisable performance levels.
Cloud Block Storage, which can be detached and re-attached to allow for movement between workloads and is aimed at enterprise applications, databases, and high frequency transactional workloads.
Cloud Object Storage is aimed at customers unstructured data and can be deployed on-premise, as part of IBM Cloud Platform offerings, or in hybrid form.
Its hardware and storage software products also allow for hybrid cloud connectivity.
What is the IBM container strategy?
Containers can be managed on IBM via Red Hat OpenShift or various IBM cloud services.
These include OpenShift on IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Code Engine, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and IBM z/OS Container Platform.
What consumption models of purchasing does IBM offer?
IBM’s Storage as a Service works across on-premise datacentre and cloud and is based on IBM FlashSystem and DS8900F hardware. It comes with a base level set at current needs plus 50% extra pre-installed. Base and expansion capacity cost the same.
Storage as a Service offers three tiers that all have the same latency – down to 50μs – and six nines availability, but differ in terms of minimum capacity, IOPS per TB, read and write throughput. These differences are reflected in costs that range from $80 to $225 per TB per month.
Storage Utility is a pay-per-use model that delivers 200% more than base capacity from day one. That means datacentre upheaval is avoided by over-provisioning and then using IBM Storage Insights to monitor further capacity needs.
Customers pay only for what they use and if their data needs shrink during any month, the bill will reflect usage, albeit with a minimum “base”.
