IBM Intends to Enter Into Enterprise Storage Cloud

At its Information Infrastructure Analyst Summit, IBM Corp. announced its intention to enter the cloud storage space with the launch of the IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud, IBM Information Archive and new consulting services.

IBM Information Archive, up to 304TB raw capacity,
with WORM and non-rewritable protection, encryption,
de-dupe, tiered storage, and Brocade FC switch

Traditional storage cloud solutions have piqued the interest of many enterprise clients for their very low price points, 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 like IBM’s General Parallel File System have been combined with the latest advances in storage, virtualization and server technologies like 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 to this, 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 have also expressed concern 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 has paid careful attention to these concerns and is offering full support for standard file access protocols so that moving data into and out of their storage cloud is as simple as a file copy operation.

Kantana Animation Studios Co., Ltd, one of the leading entertainment companies in Thailand, found that its animation processes were putting increasingly heavy demands on its data storage infrastructure. "Kantana has greatly benefited from IBM’s storage services – our animators are now able to gain access to team projects faster and easier," said Auchara Kijkanjanas, Managing Director of Kantana Animation Studios Co., Ltd. "We also benefit from greatly reduced operational costs and better business flexibility and productivity, critical drivers in a competitive and growing industry."

IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud is the first of IBM’s cloud-based storage solution, built to be implemented either on the client premise or as part of its strategic outsourcing capabilities. The company will continue to build out this area of 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.

In addition, IBM Global Business Services is adding three new cloud consulting offerings to its business and IT consulting portfolio. These new offerings provide flexible entry points based on client needs, and are priced and delivered for near-term ROI. They are designed to help clients who are looking for an end-to-end cloud business-based IT strategy or to help clients select the right cloud delivery model for their business.

• Strategy and Change Services for Cloud Adoption – IBM consultants can help firms determine how to get started with cloud adoption by quickly identifying priority business areas; acknowledging key gaps in processes, technology, organization and governance; and evaluating the range of new cloud-based delivery models in order to develop a roadmap for piloting cloud.
• IBM Strategy and Change Services for Cloud Providers – For firms looking to enter the cloud provider market, IBM can help define an in-depth roadmap that treats cloud as a new operating model rather than just a method of IT delivery – an essential step in business model evolution.
• IBM Testing Services for Cloud – IBM can also help companies build a business case that quantifies the cost, schedule and quality improvements associated with pursing a cloud application test environment. This can help reduce capital expenses by provisioning test servers on demand, decreasing the cost of test setup and tear-down and associated defects, while shortening overall cycle time.

In June of this year IBM unveiled its cross-company strategy to capture the enterprise cloud computing market, helping clients attack rising costs and complexity by workload. Since then many products and services from the portfolio have entered the market, including Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, which began its public beta on October 1, 2009.

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.