IBM Launches New Enterprise Storage Cloud Solution
Offers high performance, scalability, full standards support in a private cloud model
Note: ESJ’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor's statements.
IBM has launched the IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud and IBM Information Archive.
Traditional storage cloud solutions have piqued the interest of enterprise clients for their low price, but these systems have mostly been limited to “sandbox” use cases for secondary or tertiary copies of data or for use in development and test environments in which data does not have to be frequently accessed and does not tend to grow into large scales.
The IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud is a private cloud offering that utilizes low-cost components in a true scale-out clustered model not offered by its competition. Hallmarks of the solution include support for multiple petabytes of capacity, billions of files, and scale-out performance previously limited to the largest “high-performance computing” systems.
Industry-leading technologies such as IBM’s General Parallel File System have been combined with the latest advances in storage, virtualization, and server technologies such as XIV and BladeCenter to provide performance and scalability, all under one globally addressable namespace. The solution is highly secure and built to make use of a client’s existing security and authentication infrastructure. In addition, IBM offers tightly coupled services for implementation support and an optional ongoing lightweight managed service to help clients manage their cloud environment on an ongoing basis.
Many clients are concerned about vendor lock-in with currently available cloud solutions, especially for data storage where migration costs into and out of the cloud can be costly. IBM is offering full support for standard file access protocols so that moving data to and from their storage cloud is as simple as a file-copy operation.
IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud is the first of IBM’s cloud-based storage solutions, built to be implemented either on the client’s site or as part of its strategic outsourcing capabilities. The company will continue to update the portfolio, including a business-grade public cloud for storage, which will be offered with flexible consumption models and a self-service user interface to fully abstract the technology from the end user.
For clients looking for a single unified platform for information retention, IBM is announcing a new Smart Business System called IBM Information Archive. This integrated hardware and software solution helps organizations address their complete information retention needs, including business, legal. and regulatory, and enables organizations to leverage different tiers of storage, including disk and tape, with policy-based management that automatically moves less active information to more cost-effective storage systems. Using a customizable "collections-based" approach, the archived data can be accessed in a private cloud computing environment, even if it's stored on tape media. This capability is critical as an increasing amount of data is expected to exist in archived formats.
With key contributions from IBM Research, IBM Information Archive addresses one of the key promises of cloud computing: to provide seamless access to information, including archived data, no matter where it resides
The company will continue to offer clients more cloud consumption and delivery options to balance the advantages of the cloud model (massive scalability at low and flexible costs with little capital expense) with the need for service levels that are enterprise grade; meaning secure, governable, reliable and address operational expense to lower costs over time.
For more about IBM's cloud computing efforts, please visit www.ibm.com/cloud.