Cloud Storage Software ICStore Made in IBM Labs

IBM Corp.‘s inventors have developed cloud storage software that provides a simple interface for clients to dynamically migrate data across multiple clouds, while keeping it confidential and secure.

Today, clients across all industries, including banks, retailers and government, are embracing cloud computing to drive business innovation and growth, but underlying concerns about security, reliability and vendor lock-in have inhibited widespread cloud adoption.

IBM’s patent-pending invention overcomes concerns about data resiliency, security and service continuity via an innovative technique called InterCloud, which seamlessly stores and moves data across multiple clouds. The InterCloud method employs a ‘cloud-of-clouds’ approach that invokes the resilience of separate clouds to offer stronger protection against service outages and data loss than any single cloud can deliver.

“Our cloud-of-clouds invention can help clients avoid service outages and security incidents that impact the reliability and security of individual clouds,” said IBM fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou. “We are adding multiple levels of redundancy and reliability by making cloud migration and backup easier and faster than is currently possible.”

Enabling the cloud-of-clouds
IBM scientists have developed a software toolkit called InterCloud Storage (ICStore), which enables storage systems to access and use third-party private and/or public clouds for data migration, backup or file sharing.

ICStore uses an ‘object storage’ interface that permits clients to drag and drop files to be backed up or shared on the cloud(s) of their choice – independent of the vendor. It explicitly addresses space efficiency, data synchronization, and metadata coordination when storing data redundantly on object storage. Once a cloud fails, the backup cloud immediately responds and ensures data availability – transparently to the user. No synchronization or communication among cloud clients is needed due to the innovative approach that adds redundancy and tolerates failures.

SoftLayer Technologies, Inc., an IBM company, is the default storage provider for ICStore and it provides the robust object-based interface. ICStore and SoftLayer enable clients to overcome limits in their cloud storage capacity by dynamically routing to an alternative storage system-such as easily migrating from a remote public cloud to on-premise private cloud, optimizing the overall efficiency of storage management.

IBM scientists have developed patent-pending algorithms for ICStore which were published in a paper titled Robust data sharing with key-value stores at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN).

The technology was demonstrated in June at the IBM Edge 2013 conference in Las Vegas in conjunction with the IBM Storwize platform and is available for early trial testing.

IBM Cloud Computing
IBM have already helped more than 20,000 clients around the world. Today, it has more than 100 cloud SaaS solutions, 37,000 experts with industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of more than 25 global cloud delivery centers. Since 2007, it has invested more than $6 billion in acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives. Most recently IBM acquired SoftLayer with more than 21,000 clients in 140 countries to further build out its IaaS portfolio with an easy and secure on ramp to cloud integrating IBM SmartCloud.