IBM Unveils Capabilities to Help On-Premises Customers Manage Compliance Data With Object Storage

IBM Corp. announced two milestones in making the company’s Cloud Object Storage system much more accessible for customers with compliance-enabled vaults and concentrated dispersal mode capabilities.

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Customers, especially those in regulated industries who are typically large private cloud users, need a better, more efficient way to store their growing compliance data. The financial services, healthcare and government sectors often have strict regulatory obligations that effectively limit them to a smaller number of choices when it comes to cost effectively storing compliance data in their company data centers. Another key barrier to leveraging on-premises object storage is the lack of lower capacity, lower cost options for companies that want to get started with a smaller object storage system and have the flexibility to scale as needed. Currently, a financial services provider that needs object storage capabilities for regulatory compliance data less than 300TB is left with very limited cost-effective options.

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IBM is designing capabilities to change the economics for companies that manage compliance data on-premises while also reducing the costs of entry with two new object storage capabilities that help customers:

• Store and manage regulatory data with compliance-enabled vaults: In order to comply with regulatory retention requirements (like those in SEC 17a-4(f)), companies are required to store some data immutably, preventing it from being deleted or modified for a specified retention period, which could be years in certain cases. The company is announcing compliance-enabled vaults, a new capability of its on-premises object storage system that allows companies to create data vaults designed to help them protect data from deletion or modification as required for their compliance with regulations like SEC Rule 17a-4(f) and FINRA (Rule 4511). This new capability can help companies that must preserve electronic records in a non-rewriable and non-erasable format. One of the top five U.S. banks has adopted Cloud Object Storage system’s compliance-enabled vault capability to store their data in a manner that meets relevant SEC 17a-4(f) compliance requirements. The bank has been able to manage its growing archive of data in a regulatory compliant manner while achieving cost savings and operational simplicity.

• Deploy entry-level Cloud Object Storage systems with the ability to scale to larger configurations: Companies can now get started with the Cloud Object Storage System at a capacity as small as 72TB, which is designed to require much less hardware infrastructure than the firm’s previous offerings. The company is introducing a concentrated dispersal mode capability that enables smaller footprint systems that easily scale to larger configurations. This is an advantage for companies that are new to object storage, as they can now reduce their initial deployment commitment and retain the benefits of the firm’s Cloud Object Storage as they grow to petabyte scale and beyond. With the new concentrated dispersal mode capability, the company can create configurations that are designed to use fewer resources than previous minimal configurations and better align to customer requirements for private cloud storage.

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“With the new concentrated dispersal mode capability offered by IBM, we can offer a very attractive cost of entry to replace traditional NAS environments for a wide range of use cases, including data consolidation, departmental shares, home directories, application storage over NFS and Windows server modernization,” said Rich Weber, chief product officer, Panzura, Inc., (IBM business partner). “With the combined products from IBM and Panzura enterprise cloud file services, organizations can replace traditional NAS and scale to exabytes of data across multiple locations, all while experiencing top performance and functionality. We also see the value of IBM’s new compliance-enabled vaults and are working with IBM to deliver this capability for our joint customers.“

“The new on-premises object storage capabilities are designed to expand use cases for IBM Cloud Object Storage to archives requiring protection against data deletion and modification, and to lower the cost of a system with capacity as low as 72TB, for any use case, making initial deployment more attainable without losing the ability to scale up as usage expands,” said Rob McCammon, offering leader, cloud object storage, IBM.

The compliance-enabled vaults and concentrated dispersal mode capability is planned to be available December 1, 2017.