IBM Cloud Object Storage Service for Security, Availability and Economics of Storing Data in Hybrid Cloud

IBM Corp. introduced a cloud object storage service that redefines the security, availability and economics of storing, managing and accessing massive amounts of digital information across hybrid clouds.

The company’s Cloud Object Storage offering derives from firm’s acquisition of Cleversafe, Inc., and its portfolio of patents which are designed to deliver clients better value with industry security.

Though organizations are flocking to the cloud for improved efficiencies and IT agility, clients see a gap in their ability to store increasingly larger volumes of data – on premises and off premises.

Presently companies have to choose between storing data on internal servers and storage systems, or in the cloud. It’s a dilemma that has hindered business flexibility and raised infrastructure costs. As data volumes continue to grow across industries, the need to create flexible hybrid cloud storage solutions has intensified.

This Cloud Object Storage storage-as-a-service offerings will enable clients to scale large unstructured data volumes across on-premises systems as well as public and private clouds quickly and easily. This will increase IT system flexibility and security. In a price comparison of identical object storage capacity running on a competitive cloud, the  Cloud Object Storage demonstrated more than 25% lower costs for the capacity, environment and locations compared. Built on an innovation called SecureSlice from Cleversafe (acquired by IBM in 2015), Cloud Object Storage is designed to make storing and managing that data on the IBM Cloud reliable and available across regions and around the clock.

“As clients continue to move massive workloads to hybrid clouds there is a need for an easier, more secure and economical way to store and manage mounting volumes of digital information,” said Robert LeBlanc, SVP, IBM cloud. “With today’s announcement, IBM becomes the leading cloud vendor to provide clients the flexibility and availability of object storage across on-premises and public clouds.“

Bitly Migrates one billion datasets to company’s Cloud Object Storage;
Adopts firm as its exclusive cloud platform
Bitly, a customer experience platform, is continually looking for new ways to help organizations use its software platform to gain actionable insights about their customers. The company has adopted the Cloud Object Storage service to more analyze historical data that is being produced by the more than ten billion clicks it processes each month across the world. This historical data, up to 500TB, includes user interactions across online channels – useful information for marketers that are using Bitly to delive and measure their efforts across all marketing channels.

“With more than 400 million new links created every month, the Bitly platform is growing at an explosive rate,” said Robert Platzer, CTO, Bitly. “We turned exclusively to IBM Cloud because of its leadership in data services. Through this partnership IBM will help us transform our business and build a variety of new cloud services – from advanced analytics and data mining to data research – into our software platform. The new IBM Cloud Object Storage service will enable us to manage all the data from our on-premises and cloud infrastructure with ease and flexibility.“

Bitly’s adoption of the company’s Cloud Object Storage is part of a deep multi-year partnership with the firm. With this announcement, IBM Cloud has become the exclusive cloud platform for Bitly. Earlier this year, the company moved 25 billion data-infused links to IBM Cloud to take advantage of the high performance and global scale of IBM’s nearly 50 global Cloud Data Centers. With that migration complete, the company has turned its attention to managing all one billion datasets of the historical interactions behind those links with Cloud Object Storage.

Breaks constraints of today’s storage architecture
At the heart of the Cloud Object Storage service is company’s SecureSlice, which combines encryption and erasure coding for greater security and information dispersal which enhances data availability. These technologies can help clients satisfy their data compliance security requirements and maintain access to critical data even in the face of a regional outage. These capabilities are also delivered without having to make expensive copies of data, resulting in improved economics to clients.

Specifically:

• Security
  The company have combined erasure coding with encryption and decryption. When data comes into the Cloud Object Storage system, SecureSlice automatically encrypts each segment of data before it is erasure coded and dispersed. The content can only be re-assembled through IBM Cloud’s ‘Accesser’ technology at the client’s primary data center, where the data was originally received, and decrypted by SecureSlice.

• Availability
  Because of these innovations, Cloud Object Storage can tolerate even catastrophic regional outages without interruption of access to data or the need for customer intervention. Continuous availability is inherent in the architecture. Some traditional cloud storage providers, place the burden of data management and the cost for creating and maintaining a second copy for regional fault tolerance on the client.

• Economics
  As a result of the technology’s robust hybrid capabilities, Cloud Object Storage has demonstrated it can, for the compared capacity, environment and locations, reduce certain overall costs of cloud storage. For example, based on internal company’s testing comparing Cloud Object Storage Vault cross-region services to a vendor in head-to-head cross region service managing half petabyte of data, the company’s solution was close to 24% less expensive for the location and workload compared, and, at 5PB, the service was more than 25% less expensive. ⁽¹⁾

Delivering flexibility clients need to meet business requirements
Firm’s Cloud Object Storage is offered in two public, multi-tenant services: Cross Region Service, which sends the sliced data to at least three geographically dispersed regions across firm’s Cloud data centers; and Regional Service, which holds the data in multiple data centers in a given region. Both the Regional and Cross Region services provide SecureSlice, encrypted erasure coding to protect the data. These services complement the company’s existing Cloud Object Storage System for on premises object storage, and the Cloud Object Storage Dedicated Service, a private cloud offering that runs on bare-metal servers on IBM Cloud. All of the Cloud Object Storage services on or off-premises support Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift interfaces for greater programming flexibility.

Brings Cloud Object Storage to hundreds of storage platforms
with transparent cloud tiering
IT organizations with on-premises storage will be able to move data seamlessly to and from the cloud. Company’s Spectrum Virtualize will add hybrid cloud capabilities to nearly 400 platforms, both IBM and non-IBM. Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Scale, use Transparent Cloud Tiering to extend traditional storage to the cloud with policy driven, automated simplicity, security and control.

Cloud Object Storage is available for enterprise clients across company’s cloud data centers in the US and Europe and will be available in the AsiaPac region in December.

Availability via digital channels, with swipe-and-go credit card support, will begin in the US starting in December and Europe soon thereafter.

⁽¹⁾ Comparing IBM and competitor cross-region Cloud services. Pricing based on published IBM and competitor US list prices as of 10/13/2016. Price includes storage capacity, API operations, Internet data transfer charges, and cross-region data replication charges (competitor product only). Pricing will vary depending on capacity, object size, data access patterns, and configuration. Pricing for this comparison used a mixed footprint of small and large objects.

Resources:
IBM Cloud
IBM storage
IBM Cloud Object Storage