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Every day, business leaders perform a delicate balancing act. They work to outperform competitors and drive new business outcomes with IT resources that compliment, enhance and support business direction. As you turn to cloud computing to enhance business agility, your IT infrastructure must be easy to integrate, automate and orchestrate. IBM Spectrum Access can deliver enterprise data management and protection in hybrid and multi-cloud environments with operational control and efficiency.  Deployed on VersaStack™, a converged solution from IBM and Cisco, it offers the elements you need to deploy a private cloud solution which can deliver the economics and simplicity of the cloud, with accessibility, virtualization and performance similar to an on-premises implementation.

IBM Cloud Private is bringing public cloud services into the data center without having to worry about regulatory and compliance issues associated with public cloud. Developers can now target a single platform for both public and private cloud, making hybrid deployments much quicker and simpler to deploy.

IBM Spectrum Access for IBM Cloud Private is a pretested and validated solution that pools your compute, network and storage resources. You can efficiently deliver the economics and innovation of the cloud in an on-premises environment.  Incorporating the latest enterprise software-defined data center technology, network and storage virtualization and container integration, you can benefit from enhanced policy-based automation.  In addition, IBM Spectrum Access scales and simplifies the containerized environment scaling to more containers with faster, automated provisioning compared to native container scripting.

At its core, IBM Spectrum Access consists of:

• VersaStack™ – for compute, network and storage infrastructure.
• IBM Spectrum Control Base Edition – centralized cloud integration software that consolidates storage provisioning and abstracts storage configuration complexities from applications. Users will now be able to provision storage based on classes of storage, predefined to comply with business SLAs.
• Storage Enabler for Containers (SEC): It is the universal plug-in to all IBM block storage, enabling capacities to be provisioned and used directly by the containerized applications without manual intervention ultimately driving agility in an end-to-end fashion. It provides dynamic Persistent Volume (PV) and dynamic Persistent Volume Claims (PVC).

IBM Spectrum Access helps enterprises transform as they move to the cloud, enabling them to build new applications using modern technologies like Docker containers and Kubernetes. It delivers a certified storage solution for container environments, assisting with the client’s journey to the cloud.  Containers are a standard way to package an application and all of its dependencies so that they can be moved between environments and run without changes.  They are lightweight by design, and can maximize hardware capacities by reducing software overlays.

Leveraging VersaStack

The core foundation of IBM Spectrum Access is VersaStack™, which uses the IBM Storwize family and IBM Spectrum Virtualize as the storage back end for stateful¹ containers.  It is also architected to be resilient, highly available and scalable, featuring advanced capabilities like native mirroring, compression and snapshots.  In addition, IBM Spectrum Access incorporates the advantages of IBM Virtualization embedded within the Storwize family. Businesses can now tap into new and previously unused capacity by virtualizing IBM and external third-party storage, improving efficiency and utilization while reducing complexity and cost.

According to Ed Walsh, IBM General Manager for Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure,

“True private cloud and hybrid-cloud deployment models are increasingly important in enterprises’ digital transformation strategies. IBM continues to be the market leader in storage software, and is excited to deliver IBM Spectrum Access to enable enterprise data management and protection for IBM Cloud Private, with operational and VersaStack™ infrastructure efficiency.”

IBM Cloud Private with IBM Spectrum Access is designed to accelerate the work of enterprise developers, by providing access to valuable data and applications behind the firewall through a flexible container-based architecture and API-based catalog of services.  In addition, everything from best-practice architecture designs to detailed configuration documentation is available to make a single-vendor deployment option a far easier and faster path.

Learn more by clicking here.

¹In stateful support, the data “persists” (stays intact) even after the container is stopped or removed.

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