This might be a silly thought, but with NetApp buying Engenio a few months ago, and now HDS buying BluArc, I’ve been wondering if IBM might get out of the storage hardware business.

They don’t really build most of their hardware (it’s all NetApp / Engenio at the low to mid end), XIV hasn’t been a huge success, SONAS doesn’t seem to be going anywhere (though I could be wrong about that), and the Storwize v7000 / SVC products are great but completely lost in amongst all their other offerings.

I doubt they’d exit storage entirely, especially as the DS8000 product range is tightly linked to mainframe sales for IBM, but I don’t know if there’s really much benefit being gained for IBM outside of the high-end profit margins.

There’s no other part of IBM I can think of that is so reliant on rebadging another top tier manufacturers products without adding any value of their own, certainly it’s something that the server teams dont’ do.

Of course, another option is that IBM could just buy NetApp, which might make me look a bit silly..