Serving customers better with cognitive storage

01 November, 2017
Sam Werner
IBM

IBM recently announced plans to add new artificial intelligence (AI) functionality to its cloud-based storage management platform, IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights. The new cognitive capability will stream device metadata from IBM Storage systems to the cloud, augmenting human understanding with machine learning insights to help optimize the performance, capacity and health of clients’ storage infrastructure.

IBM cognitive storage management capabilities offered by this platform already include optimization with data tiering and reclamation of unused storage.  IBM plans to add further artificial intelligence that will reduce the time it takes to monitor complex infrastructures, and to find and resolve issues that impact application performance.

An early user program is already available.

Why cognitive? “Cognitive,” or artificial intelligence (AI), is a big deal.  Cognitive computing offers fundamental differences in how systems are built and interact with humans. AI-based systems build knowledge and learn, understand natural language, and reason and interact more naturally with human beings than traditional systems.

The benefits from adding AI to storage management are huge. As any storage administrator knows, managing large storage systems requires many hours of monitoring, analysis, decision-making and adjustment. When problems arise, troubleshooting complex storage infrastructure and implementing the most effective solutions can be time consuming. Applications can slow down or stop. AI will transform today’s storage management reality: While the auto industry is talking about self-driving cars, the storage industry is talking about self-governing storage. Say goodbye to human error, sleepless nights, and disrupted application data.

Pairing cognitive with support. Pairing cognitive computing with storage support yields the best of both worlds. Support teams can get a live view into a client’s environment, enabling real time asset management, faster problem determination that improves mean time to resolution, advanced automated actions (automatically dispatching an engineer with the right part) and predictive insights (proactively taking actions before failures occur). When faced with serious issues, human understanding and expertise are supplemented on both the support and client sides with game-changing cognitive/AI-based insights that shorten resolution time.

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When AI meets IBM Storage. Today, clients are already using IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights—delivered from the IBM Cloud—to work more effectively. It monitors and compares more than one hundred metrics from the breadth of the IBM storage portfolio to quickly identify hotspots. It applies best practices to predict problems before clients are even aware of them. It uses historical growth metrics to increase capacity forecasting precision, and predictive analytics as the basis for recommendations for moving data to the most cost-effective tier. The new capabilities bring that cognitive power to support functions to serve clients better.

Help transform the storage user experience. We invite customers to explore the new capabilities and provide important feedback by joining our early user program. To nominate your organization: click here.

To learn more about IBM’s proactive and cognitive storage management capabilities, go here.

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