<p>Storagebod El Reg storage man Chris Mellor's pieces on IBM's storage revenues here and here make for some interesting reading. Things are not looking great with the exception of XIV and Storwize products. I am not sure whether Mellor's analysis is entirely correct as it is hard to get any granularity from IBM. But his take on Big Blue doesn't surprise me either, as there are some serious weaknesses in IBM's storage portfolio.</p><p>Firstly, there is still an awful lot of OEM'd kit from NetApp in the Big Blue's portfolio - and it certainly appears that this is not selling, or being sold, as well as it had done in the past. So IBM's struggles have some interesting knock-on effects for NetApp.</p><p>IBM is certainly positioning the Storwize products in the space which was traditionally occupied by the OEM'd LSI (now NetApp) arrays; pricing is pretty aggressive and places them firmly in the space occupied by other competing dual-head arrays. And it finally has a feature set to match their competitors. Well, certainly in the block space.</p><p>XIV seems to compete pretty well when put up against the lower-end VMAX and HDS "enterprise-class" arrays. It is incredibly easy to manage and performs well enough, although it isn't the right platform for the most demanding applications. IBM have, however, grasped one of the underlying issues with storage today; that it all needs to be simplified. I still have some doubts about the architecture but XIV has tried to solve the spindle-to-gigabyte issue.</p><p><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/30/ibm_dancing/">Keep reading...</a></p>