IBM Improving Data Resilience Across Data Center

By Scott Baker, VP, storage product marketing, IBM Corp.

IT leaders today confront challenges and opportunities very different from those they faced just 5 or 10 years ago. Data volumes have exploded, knowledge workers often work remotely, cyber-attacks have proliferated, and hybrid cloud has become the standard architecture.

For years IBM Storage has provided clients with hardware, software, and best practices to help secure their data from an ever-evolving whirlwind of dangers, both external and internal. Today we expand those offerings with new data resilience products as well as enhancements to current products’ data protection capabilities.

Complementing the capabilities that Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus bring to on-premises and cloud-based applications respectively, we’re enhancing workload-specific data resilience with the announcement of:

• Sentinel for SAP HANA, and

• Spectrum Protect Plus Online Services for Salesforce

Spectrum Sentinel for SAP HANA is an end-to-end automated cyber resilience solution that performs ransomware anomaly analysis of immutable SAP HANA primary storage snapshots and provides automated recovery orchestration. Using the same technology as Spectrum Sentinel for Epic, which we announced in June this year to improve data resilience for healthcare records, Spectrum Sentinel for SAP HANA enhances protection for this popular in-memory enterprise database management system.

Spectrum Sentinel for SAP HANA uses Spectrum Copy Data Management to automatically create immutable, application-aware Safeguarded Copy backups which it scans for malware, using ML to detect signs of possible corruption and generate forensic reports. Because Spectrum Sentinel can intelligently isolate infected backups, your organization can identify the most recent verified and validated backup copies, accelerating time to recovery.

Spectrum Protect Plus Online Services for Salesforce delivers a backup and recovery solution that enables clients to easily backup and restore cloud-based Salesforce workloads. Some IT organizations are only now realizing that they’re solely responsible for data protection for their Saas workloads, as the leading Saas vendors provide limited, time-consuming, and expensive backup and recovery services. That’s a big gap, because many organizations Salesforce consider is a mission-critical application – losing their Salesforce data would be catastrophic. This solution fills that gap with a combination of automatic daily backups, on demand backups, and comprehensive restore capabilities to keep their businesses moving forward.

Other parts of IBM storage portfolio have also been enhanced, including:

• FlashSystem storage arrays feature policy-based replication capability, as well as encryption on the wire for FlashSystem replication;

• Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus have new data security enhancements; and

• Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud on Azure 8 adds functionality for currency with Spectrum Virtualize on FlashSystem and with Spectrum Virtualize appliances, including support for the new policy-based asynchronous replication capability.

At IBM storage, we recognize that IT teams face new challenges in preventing data loss and responding rapidly and effectively in the event of a breach. We believe the new data resilience capabilities we are announcing will help clients achieve those objectives.