IBM updates its storage-systems portfolio

IBM announced a pair of additions to its storage portfolio designed to improve the access to and management of data across hybrid-cloud environments and offer faster, higher capacity.

The first is container-native software defined storage (SDS) called IBM Spectrum Fusion that’s due out in the second half of 2021. It will initially come in the form of a container-native hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) system that integrates compute, storage, and networking. Next year, IBM plans to release an SDS-only version of Spectrum Fusion.

The software combines IBM’s general parallel filesystem technology and its data-protection software for a simpler approach to accessing data within data centers, at the edge, and across hybrid-cloud environments.

It is designed to come equipped with Red Hat OpenShift to to support both virtual machines and containers and provide SDS for cloud, edge, and containerized data centers.

With Spectrum Fusion, organizations have to manage just a single copy of data rather than creating duplicate copies when moving application workloads across the enterprise. This reduces overall instances and makes it easier to keep up with data-compliance regulations like GDPR.

Spectrum Fusion is being engineered to integrate with IBM Cloud Satellite to help  manage cloud services at the edge, data center, or in the public cloud with a single management pane. Launched last month, it enables building and running applications in any public cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. It extends the services of IBM Cloud to private data centers and runs as-a-service, so the bill is based on consumption, much like Amazon Outposts and Azure Stack.           

New Storage Systems

The second announcement is updates to IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS) family of high-performance, scalable storage products designed for easy deployment. The revamped model ESS 5000 offers 10% more storage capacity for a total of 15.2PB.

The ESS 3200 is a 2U storage device with up to 367TB of capacity and up to 80 Gbps throughput per node—a 100% read-performance boost from its predecessor, the ESS 3000. The 3200 supports up to 8 InfiniBand HDR-200 or ethernet-100 ports for high throughput and low latency.

Both the ESS 3200 and ESS 5000 feature containerized system software and support for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI), CSI snapshots and clones Red Hat Ansible, Windows, Linux, and bare metal environments. The systems include IBM Spectrum Scale, the company’s clustered file system.

The 3200 and 5000 also work with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, the company’s containerized platform of integrated data and AI services, for integration with IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog (WKC) and DB2. The two units are also integrated with IBM Cloud Satellite.

The two Elastic Storage Systems are available now.