FlashSystem NAS

In Japan, systems are often built on an application-by-application or project-by-project basis rather than company-wide optimization.

Behind this is Japan's tax system.

In Japan, once a machine is purchased, it must be depreciated over a five-year period. The Japanese tax office will never allow a shorter depreciation period.

It is difficult to look at the entire company later and put it together efficiently.

Therefore, there are sales opportunities in all industries.

The U.S. industry-specific approach and the business practice of replacing equipment after three years do not work in Japan.

When customers consider implementing FlashSystem, the low-end models of Netapp and DellEMC are always the subject of comparison.

The price of the FlashSystem 5035 controller enclosure alone is approximately 2.1 million Japanese yen.

The wholesale price from us, IBM Japan's hardware VAD, is about 1,000,000 Japanese yen.

Of course, SSD and HDD media fees, interface fees, maintenance fees, etc. are also required separately.

Recently, we are often told by our Japanese partners that

IBM is not attractive except for FCM and external virtualization.

Other companies offer NAS at almost the same price; FC connectivity is also available in general.

NetApp pays significant compensation to key partners, which it uses to fund price reduction campaigns for individual products.

SGC also loses out to Netapp Ontap because NetApp does not buy special software and Ontap does ransomware movement detection.

IBM also said that Qradar can be done with Redbook, but it is unlikely that ransomware will repeatedly try to log into FlashSystem as described in Redbook. Really, there is no description of how the AI finds ransomware and how to configure it.

In order for partners to learn how to configure it, they need to understand English, and the cost of learning English is very heavy for Japanese.

In this respect, other companies have extensive manuals in Japanese. In the first place, the setup process is easy.

In the case of IBM, programming is often required, and the total number of human resources who can do such things is insufficient in Japan, where the population is shrinking.

The FS5200 is popular among customers as an inexpensive storage device with NVMe connectivity, but since it is 1U, only 12 FCMs can be inserted.

Small starters initially purchase the smallest size FCM and install additional FCMs in the main unit, but there are only a few FCMs left that can be installed.

Even if additional expansion chassis are purchased later, the inability to mount FCMs in the expansion chassis also limits sales opportunities.

PureStorage allows you to buy back the original smaller size SSD if you change to a larger size SSD.

If you replace the controller, they will also buy back the old controller.

If old PowerSystems could change models, why can't IBM?

IBM always only guides the replacement of the main unit.

They do not buy controller-only or SSD-only parts.

When compared with 10G iSCSI, the performance is better than IBM.

You can use RJ45 cable for 10G iSCSI connection, so you don't need to buy expensive network switch for optical connection.

I actually looked at the performance of FS5035 and FS5200 on StorM, and while the FlashSystem is designed for the best performance with emphasis on FC connection, the FlashSystem CPU is the bottleneck for 10G iSCSI connection, and the performance is only half of FC, even though the SSD load is still not so high.

Partners are deciding on IA servers before they choose storage.

The fact that IBM is giving away both PCs and IA servers is also very detrimental to storage sales.

Finally, many young people these days have never even heard of IBM by name, let alone what it makes.