IBM Spectrum Protect Plus delivers modern data protection

21 March, 2018
Devon Helms
IBM

Modern data protection for your data-driven, multi-cloud digital business

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus has been well received by press, analysts and the market. Steve Scully, Senior Analyst at The Evaluator Group, identified one of the critical reasons why in a recent paper on the subject: “A trend in the data center is to get more out of backup data than just recovery. Reusing data for new use cases such as DevOps and analytics allows IT organizations to derive more value from their data. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus indexes all VM and file copies to further meet the needs driven by this new trend.” You can read more of Steve’s comments in his paper. With all of the attention IBM Spectrum Protect has received since its launch, and so much activity and momentum around this new easy-to-use modern data protection, availability, and reuse solution, it is hard to keep track of it all. Here are some highlights in case you missed them.

On February 20th, IBM Storage announced IBM Spectrum Protect Plus version 10.1.1 with new features and enhancements in a live-streamed event. This latest release added the ability to create and catalog snapshot copies for databases including SQL and Oracle and vSnap repository replication. In 10.1.1, administrators can protect the copy repository and make it available for easy access at second sites. We hinted that IBM Cloud would be announcing something big for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, and this week at IBM THINK, the IBM Cloud team announced IBM Spectrum Protect Plus would be available in their marketplace for VMware environments on IBM Cloud, giving administrators a simple data protection option for the VMs.

The First IBM Think Conference

Speaking of IBM THINK, that’s where I’ve been this week, and what a week it’s been. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus has gotten a lot of attention with several breakout sessions, birds of a feather sessions, and deep dives with the geniuses building the future of data protection. A particularly interesting session hosted by Bina Hallman, Vice President of Offering Management Storage & Software-Defined, and Sam Werner, Vice President of Offering Management, Software-Defined Infrastructure and Storage Software revved up our engines with a high-octane Formula One race-inspired presentation on the future of data protection and availability. Matt Cadieux, CIO of Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, joined them on stage to discuss the incredible demands of data and analytics in the competitive sport of Formula One.

I mentioned at the start of this blog post that we’ve seen great attention from the market. Spectrum Protect Plus has received a lot of attention from the ecosystem. This week, for example, we see the new appliance coming from STORServer. STORServer has offered a data protection appliance based on IBM Spectrum Protect for some time now. This week, STORServer announced the release of a new data protection appliance for virtual environments leveraging IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. Bill Smoldt, the President and CEO of STORServer had this to say about the release: “Today’s VM environments present several unique data protection and recovery challenges for administrators and their organizations. Our new converged data protection appliances bring the simplified user experience of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus into our award-winning appliances to help users save valuable time and resources when managing and protecting the precious data in their VM environments.” For more on this, you can read the full press release here.

In addition to IBM THINK, you may have seen us at a number of other venues including VMworld US and Barcelona, where IBM Spectrum Protect Plus was named a Hot Product by Network World, VMUG Netherlands and VMUG Poland. In fact, you’ll probably see us at most of the VMware User Group meetings across the world this year, as we preach the gospel of data protection and reuse made easy by IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. In fact, our own Steve Kenniston, Global Spectrum Software Business Development Executive joined tech luminaries for The Tech Field Day in San Jose, CA. Steve shared our vision of how reuse can unlock the value of secondary data and improve business outcomes.

It has been exciting times for us in IBM’s modern data protection land and we’re just getting started. With a full schedule of IBM Tech U, IBM Spectrum Storage User Groups, VMware User Groups, VMworld North America, VMworld Europe, Amazon Reinvent and Microsoft Ignite coming over the next few months, there will surely be many more exciting developments to share with you all. We hope to see you out there.

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