IBM Drives Innovation Storage AI Big Data, Modern Data Protection and Hybrid Multicloud

Blog posted by Eric Herzog, VP, product marketing and management, storage systems, IBM Corp. on July 10, 2019

IBM Corp. drives innovation in storage for AI and big data, modern data protection and hybrid multicloud

Storage for AI and big data
IBM continues to enhance storage solutions for AI and big data so clients get the most out of their growing data on premises and in the cloud. The company announces innovations that allow clients to leverage more heterogenous data sources and data types for deeper insights from AI and analytics. They expand their ability to consolidate rapidly expanding data on IBM’s object storage and extend data protection to help support more workloads in hybrid cloud environments.

Analytics and AI are how your business can turn data into value. Increasingly, that data is unstructured, and unstructured data poses unique challenges. IBM Spectrum Discover helps enterprise address these challenges by providing unified metadata management and insights for file and object storage on premises and in the cloud.

Spectrum Discover
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“The future of digital transformation and AI is powered by unstructured data and we’re excited about the possibilities that IBM Spectrum Discover enables for innovators, builders and domain experts across industries to create new digital experiences and discover deep insights like never before,” notes Stan Wysocki, president,and IBM business partner, Mark III Systems. “As an IBM Platinum Partner jointly working with organizations around IBM Spectrum Discover since beta, Mark III sees the enormous potential for data scientists, researchers, analytics teams, developers, and IT architects to not only vastly improve their understanding of their oceans of data, but also to lay the foundation for the next-generation AI, ML and analytics that will define their organizations.“

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Already a tool for gaining insight into exabyte-scale unstructured data, Spectrum Discover extends support for heterogeneous storage environments with connectors for Dell EMC Isilon, NetApp, Amazon S3, Ceph, and other S3- and NFSv3-compliant data sources. It can deliver insight into an expansive universe of file and object data, both on premises and in the cloud. Big Blue has also added new content-based data classification and tagging capabilities with the ability to extract metadata from over a thousand different file types.

There is also the ability to automatically detect certain types of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other types of sensitive data making it potentially easier for organizations to manage data in compliance with GDPR and other regulations. These enhancements are designed to enable enterprise to create an open and transparent data ecosystem for AI and analytics, make it easier for data scientists to find and curate data for analysis and enable storage administrators to optimize storage and manage unstructured data.

IBM Cloud Object Storage
Spectrum Discover isn’t the only IBM Storage offering to see enhancements. The company is also announcing the next gen of capabilities and value for IBM Cloud Object Storage. When data grows at explosive rates, enterprise needs two things: capacity and economy. Cloud Object Storage Gen 2 delivers a new architecture for object storage that’s scalable to over 10PB in a single rack at a cost of less than one cent per gigabyte per month[1]. Smaller capacities are more economical too[2], and the new architecture offers flexibility to tailor cofigurations to meet requirement for performance or capacity.

“With the latest updates to the IBM Cloud Object Storage family of products, Gen2, we’ve seen many new opportunities and the ability to revisit customers that were previously considering but haven’t moved yet,” states Todd Schneeberger, field solutions architect, CDW Corp. “Gen2 introduces more flexibility with higher performance and a lower price point. The increased density also allows for a smaller footprint, saving costs in many data center environments. Overall, our customers are excited to build out their long-term storage, whether backup, archival, or other needs, in both on premises, multiple data centers, and with seamless cloud integration too.“

Modern data protection
Watch webcast: IBM drives continued innovation in storage for AI and big data, modern data protection, hybrid multicloud (registration required).

The IBM Storage design principle of security has not been overlooked in today’s announcements. IDC reports that 73% of large enterprises (1,000+ employees) plan to use public cloud for backup, archive and DR for on-premises operations.[3] IBM Spectrum Protect Plus provides data protection for hybrid multicloud environments. Now this data protection solution is available in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace to provide unified management for on-premises and cloud-based database workloads hosted on AWS.

“The ability of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus to backup databases running on AWS gives us the ability to centrally manage Oracle, SQL, DB2, and MongoDB backup, replication, and recovery for clients that have workloads running both on premises and in the cloud,” notes Joseph King, CTO, VP presales and technology Services, CAS Severn, Inc. “This is an exciting new capability that streamlines backup administration and reduces the cost of DR.“

Spectrum Protect Plus has been enhanced with additional features and capabilities, including integration with IBM tape solutions to achieve ‘air gap’ protection for data; support for Amazon Glacier, Azure archive, and IBM Cloud Object Storage archive tier; new DR from backup repositories running on AWS; a new user interface experience and multiple new language translations.

Hybrid multicloud and more
Along with these major announcements, IBM Storage is also announcing a number of additional new capabilities:

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There’s a new Cisco Validated Design – a VersaStack solutions converged infrastructure solution with IBM flashSystem 9100 powered by Spectrum Virtualize that allows enterprise to move data back and forth in a hybrid multicloud configuration. This is the first Cisco Validated Design for an NVMe-based storage platform for VersaStack from IBM.
Spectrum Scale supports on-premises data with data stored on AWS or IBM Cloud.
The IBM flashSystem family offers a number of new non-disruptive upgrade paths.
IBM Storage Networking C-Type switches provide NVMe-ready options and have analytics built into the ASIC platform, among other enhancements.
IBM’s Storage for Blockchain solution expands its offering to include additional performance, capacity and cost options for storing off-chain data.

This spectrum of announcements demonstrates continued commitment to helping clients build and maintain open hybrid multicloud environments.

Learn more about IBM Storage announcements and join the webcast to hear more about how we are enhancing IBM Storage for AI and big data to handle more data sources and data types and helping to expand our clients’ ability to consolidate on the object storage.

^[1] Less than $.008 per gigabyte per month usable capacity, based on street price for configured Slicestor 106 with software hardware and support costs for three years.
^[2] Compared to previous Gen1 systems. Starting less than $43.100 per system, based on street price for 144TB starter (one year software hardware and support).
^[3] IDC: Overview of the Public Cloud IaaS Storage Market and Partner Opportunities, June 2018