Systems and storage are finally coming together, and IBM is at the forefront of this potentially revolutionary transition. Krishna Nathan, the head of development for Big Blue’s storage business, explained how flash is unifying the data center in a recent interview with Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante.

Nathan says that storage has historically been isolated from the rest of the data center because the overwhelming majority of enterprise capacity was based on disk, a technology that is mechanical at its core. This fact of life required an intermediation layer between storage and other sub-systems.

The disk bottleneck still persists today, but Nathan says that flash is changing this paradigm.

Solid-state eliminates the need to design systems with mechanical limitations in mind, a boon that makes it possible to tighten software onto storage in a way that was unimaginable just a few years ago.  With no intermediation layer to worry about, applications can manage and allocate capacity automatically without the help of an administrator.

Nathan believes that flash will not only unify the data center, but also abstract what Vellante refers to as the “horrible storage stack”. He predicts that all active data will eventually run on tier 0 storage, while everything else will be moved to a second tier consisting of cheap disk systems.

Vellante asks Nathan if IBM is working on a software-based solution akin to Fusion-io’s Atomic Writes. The executive says that they are: the goal is to deliver technology that allows systems to treat flash like DRAM.

See Nathan’s entire segment below.