Open Beta of IBM Spectrum Scale Transparent Cloud Tiering

On a blog of IBM Corp., Douglas O’Flaherty, portfolio marketing, Spectrum Scale, wrote te following article:
 

Spectrum Scale Transparent Cloud Tiering

The power of software-defined storage is not to merely lower costs through commodity hardware, it is to harness storage innovations that improve overall economics, performance, resiliency and flexibility. What differentiates one solution from another is the completeness of vision and the robust execution that meets requirements from both end users and storage administrators.

IBM Design Thinking focuses our efforts on the user’s needs and invites our users to be part of the process.
 
IBM Spectrum Scale announced the Open Beta for Spectrum Scale transparent cloud tiering, where you can test new functionality and provide feedback. The new feature allows administrators to add private or public cloud object storage as a target for Spectrum Scale data.

This isn’t a gateway solution, but rather an integration of cloud-scale storage directly into Spectrum Scale. A storage administrator can place data on Cleversafe, SoftLayer object storage, or Amazon S3 with the same ease with which they choose a local disk array.
 
CIOs and storage architects want to add cost-optimized cloud services or on-premises object storage with all the benefits and tools expected from enterprise storage without disrupting their current data operations. By making transparent cloud tiering a feature of Spectrum Scale, administrators can benefit from cost-optimized cloud services or on-premises object storage. The solution provides transparent active archive or highly competitive public cloud storage services within Spectrum Scale.
 
The architectural challenge of adding object or cloud data has been to avoid adding data silos and losing track of data that has been moved. Because this is an extension to Spectrum Scale, policy-driven targeting, migration, encryption and unified access are all extended to data stored in a cloud-scale object store. Spectrum Scale manages file seeking and other metadata operations so the solution is transparent and responsive for end users.
 
To meet the needs of administrators, adding highly-available cloud or object storage to a Spectrum Scale cluster will be straightforward. This innovation eliminates hand-coded copy scripts, complicated archive and restore configurations and gateway systems that need to be separately maintained.