Build Simpler, More Resilient Hybrid Cloud With IBM Storage

By Chris Saul, marketing manager, Spectrum Storage, IBM Corp.

It’s clear that businesses are embracing hybrid cloud. Indeed, a recent report from the IBM Institute for Business Value states that 97% of business are piloting, implementing or integrating cloud in their operations. ⁽¹⁾

However, as hybrid cloud environments become the norm, businesses must contend with additional IT complexity, public cloud costs and threats from cyberattack and other data destructive events.

IBM is announcing new capabilities and integrations designed to help organizations reduce IT complexity, deploy cost-effective solutions and improve data and cyber resilience for hybrid cloud environments.

Extending hybrid cloud storage simplicity to Microsoft Azure
One way to reduce hybrid cloud complexity is to ensure consistent function, APIs, management, and user interface across on-premises and public cloud platforms. This can be accomplished with SDS. That’s where Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud comes in. It’s the cloud-based counterpart of the software in FlashSystem and SAN Volume Controller.

It provides the same storage functionality in the cloud as you find on-premises, which makes it easy to implement hybrid cloud storage scenarios such as disaster recovery, cloud DevOps, and data migration. And since it provides this same function across clouds, it also makes it easy to use multiple clouds or to move from cloud to cloud.

Now we’re extending our cloud support to Azure in addition to IBM Cloud and AWS.
On Azure, Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud supports IBM Safeguarded Copy, which automatically creates isolated immutable snapshot copies designed to be inaccessible by software – including malware – and which can be used to recover on-premises or cloud data quickly in the event of a data destructive event.

Expediting Turbonomic integration for automated operations
IBM recently acquired Turbonomic, an Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) software provider. With this acquisition, IBM will be able to provide customers with AI-powered automation capabilities that span from AIOps to application and infrastructure observability.

IBM and Turbonomic plan to deliver benefits for customers of FlashSystem by improving application performance awareness and automation.

• Turbonomic will collect information from FlashSystem storage including storage capacity, IO/s, and latency for each storage array.

• Turbonomic’s analysis engine combines FlashSystem data, virtualization data and application data to continuously automate non-disruptive actions and ensure applications get the storage performance they require.

This can eliminate the need for unnecessary over-provisioning and safely increase density without sacrificing performance. On average, customers can increase density by 30% without any application performance impact. ⁽²⁾

For environments using Instana, Red Hat OpenShift, or any major hypervisor (such as VMware vSphere) with FlashSystem, Turbonomic will observe the entire stack from application to array. This enables all operations teams to quickly visualize and automate corrective actions to mitigate performance risk caused by resource congestion, while safely increasing density.

Other key storage enhancements
IBM is continuing to enhance the data and cyber resilience capabilities of its storage platform to help customers combat the threat of ransomware and other data destructive events.

Enhancements include:

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• Spectrum Protect Plus offers a suite of enhancements designed for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes to support data protection for containerized environments. These include Red Hat certification, support for OpenShift workloads deployed on Azure and direct backup to S3 object storage.

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• Spectrum Protect now supports replicating backup data to additional data protection servers. Additionally, it now supports using object storage for long-term data retention to reduce the cost of backup.

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• Spectrum Scale global data fabric gains a new high-performance S3 object interface. This means that cloud native S3 applications can provide faster results without the typical delay for object storage. Additionally, a new GPU direct storage (GDS) interface enables Nvidia applications to run up to 100% faster with Spectrum Scale.

• Elastic Storage System 3200 now includes a 38TB IBM FlashCore module. This FlashCore module is double the size of the previous, largest option, doubling the capacity of an ESS 3200 to 912TB in two rack units.

^[1] The hybrid cloud platform advantage: A guiding star to enterprise transformation, IBM Institute for Business Value, August 2021.
^[2] Based on analysis of existing Turbonomic users.