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Today, IBM Storage is announcing many new innovations across the portfolio focused on enabling and supporting simple and automated management, data movement and the placement of data across clouds and on premises. This demonstrates IBM’s continuing focus on what we’ve found matters most to our customers and Business Partners: eliminating silos, breaking down barriers, and supporting a modern multi-cloud infrastructure.

Industry analysts confirm that 78 percent of enterprises expect to be utilizing three or more different clouds within the next two years.[1] The drivers of this major shift include workload requirements, better security and greater cost efficiency.

With this transformation comes major expectations – modern enterprises want the ability to easily move applications and data between clouds based solely on their own business and IT requirements.[2]

Just like our customers, this is exactly where IBM Spectrum Storage is focused.

“Enterprises and service providers everywhere are rapidly moving to multi-cloud,” notes Chris Bogan, a data protection expert with IBM business partner Mark III Systems. “To address their needs and stay ahead of the competition, we need technology and solutions designed to make multi-cloud simple, intelligent and efficient. This is exactly what IBM is delivering today.”

Multi-cloud architectures help modern businesses maximize the value of data and increase agility while keeping costs under control. The innovations announced today can enhance the ability of industry-leading IBM software-defined storage solutions to deliver a trusted foundation for moving and protecting business information between public, private  and hybrid clouds by enabling highly functional and efficient multi-cloud environments.

IBM Spectrum Protect and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus have both added new functionality to further simplify and secure data protection and availability. IBM Spectrum Protect has long provided automated tiering and we’ve enhanced that to include tiering to object storage targets based on the backup data state. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, our data recovery and reuse solution for application and virtual environments, now ensures secure storage of secondary data with vSnap repository encryption. Read more about this in our IBM Spectrum Protect launch blog and our IBM Spectrum Protect Plus launch blog.

Innovation within IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) is accelerating. IBM is making it easier to add more models to the many existing hardware options for COS. This means that with IBM software, the private cloud can quickly utilize the most modem servers for scalable and always on storage. IBM has also extended COS support as a backup or archive target for z/OS. IBM DS8800 now supports in-flight encryption to COS. Mainframe data is protected when transferred on non-mainframe communication channels to leverage the efficiency, simplicity, and scalability of IBM Cloud Object Storage. Read more about a new 3u cluster configuration and about other new features in our IBM COS launch blog.

Award-winning IBM Spectrum Scale has added new features as well. The software-defined file storage leveraged by the world’s fastest supercomputer now offers Amazon AWS support with bring-your-own license functionality and AWS QuickStart for rapid deployment. IBM Spectrum Scale 5.0.2 provides enhancements to help ease administration, including file audit logging, watch folder, an improved user interface and greater network resilience. IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS), powered by IBM Spectrum Scale, is now even easier to implement and consume, with preconfigured systems and implementation services to support industry standard NAS protocols in addition to high-performance POSIX.  The new flexible licensing is designed specifically to support multi-cloud infrastructure as our clients grow. Read more about this in our IBM Spectrum Scale launch blog and our ESS launch blog.

IBM Storage is also announcing new solutions within targeted industry verticals and business use cases. IBM Cloud Private has added IBM Spectrum Access Blueprint support for IBM Z. IBM Storage solutions for SAP applications for EPIC Electronic Health Records applications now include new multicloud options. And IBM Storage now offers new high performance, highly efficient Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solutions provided by IBM FlashSystem 9100.

 “The substantial number of IBM Storage innovations announced this week send a clear message to any other technology vendors offering software-defined storage solutions for multi-cloud – lead, follow, or get out of the way!” Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President IDC’s worldwide infrastructure practice.

The IBM Storage innovations being announced this week are not limited to the software side of the IBM Storage portfolio. Storage systems are releasing significant new features and capabilities.

For data sets and business use cases requiring the highest performance and availability, IBM DS8880F is the number one family of storage systems supporting mainframe-based IT infrastructure.^[3] Now, IBM is introducing a new member of the DS8880F family – DS8882F – a rack-mounted solution designed to improve efficiency and flexibility while providing up to 50 percent savings in power consumption and in physical space[4]. DS8882F provides advanced software capabilities as the larger DS888xF systems at the lowest entry cost. The new system is the first enterprise-class storage solution that can be integrated into IBM Z model ZR1 or IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper II, providing a powerful and affordable end-to-end solution in a single 19-inch industry standard rack. It offers an easy and cost-efficient upgrade path for legacy systems such as DS6000, DS8800, and DS8870 among others. Read more about this in our DS8880F launch blog.

Across the entire portfolio, IBM is focused on providing industry-leading storage innovation to enable more efficient and agile multi-cloud solutions for our worldwide customer and partner base. Learn more about how your IT team can leverage the new multi-cloud capabilities to reduce costs, improve agility and accelerate the success of your enterprise at our announcement webinar or at VMworld, booth 1312.

[1] IDC Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide IT Cloud and Software-Defined Datacenter Decision Economics, Tim Grieser, August 2017

[2] IDC CloudView 2016, N=214 North American Hybrid Cloud Users IDC# US41587016 (July 2016)    

[3] Calculations based on data from IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker file, March 2017

[4] Compared to a full populated DS8884F data system

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