IBM Transformational Technologies for Storage

IBM Spectrum Suite, IBM Spectrum Compute and IBM Cloud Object Storage will change the way to manage and optimize your data.

Last Monday I was invited to speak to many important customers in across the U.A.E. about “Faster, Open Infrastructure to Power your Business” at an event sponsored by our premier regional business partner Gulf Business Machines (GBM). When I was preparing for the event I looked over some slide decks but none of them really represented the rapidly changing technology that customers are looking to introduce into their environment when it hit me “why not put away the slides and talk about transformational technologies that can give an immediate competitive advantage to our customers.”

As I stood in front of fifty plus customers I asked them bluntly if they wanted to hear another hardware pitch from IBM. Most of the customer nervously laughed since they thought that is why they were in attendance. Sensing their uneasiness, told an old fable of an pitch that I attended over fifteen years ago where an IBM vice president was talking about IBM’s propensity to name everything an acronym. She explained that IBM was so bad at naming things that if IBM had invented sushi we would have called it “cold dead fish!” This segue was to introduce the IBM Spectrum brand which markets together products like GPFS, TPC and LTFS. Not only fifteen years ago were we bad at naming things, we only played well with other IBM technologies. 

After a brief chuckle, I drew them back to transformational technologies and why the vision for the future of their business was not more hardware. Now as a sales manager with a robust hardware portfolio you might think that this is cutting of my nose despite my face; however, I would beg to differ with you. IBM now leads the market with transformational technologies like IBM Spectrum Compute, IBM Spectrum Suite, IBM Cloud Object Storage (formerly Cleversafe) and now IBM Spectrum Copy Data Services. So you are probably thinking, why is a hardware company talking about all this software-defined storage (SDS) and compute products? I truly believe that IBM’s one billion dollar investment in SDS now puts the customer in charge of how they not only store their most important resource, their data, but how they present it back to the lines of business. 

You are probably still scratching your head. Let’s look at Spectrum Suite in depth and see why this is transformational technology. Spectrum Virtualize provides storage virtualization that allows the customer something now other vendor offers and that is choice. Why choice? With IBM’s Spectrum Virtualize you can select from over 200 storage devices to manage under a single management tool. No need to learn all the other management tools, worry about vendor lock, or have to plan for long migration cycles to new technology.  Now I would contend with IBM’s one billion dollar investment in flash technology that you will want to put IBM’s vast of all flash arrays in your environment to provide the full realization of the value of SDS but with Spectrum Virtualize, you now have the freedom to choose the device that fits your need. With Spectrum Suite, you can also implement Spectrum Scale, which used to be called GPFS (see cold dead fish above) or general parallel file system. This is single name space that turns your storage in a huge usable pool. Next Spectrum Control, which used to be named TPC. Now you can manage all your storage devices with a simple set of tools. Spectrum Protect, formerly Tivoli Storage Manager, will manage and protect all your back up data. Spectrum Archive, formerly LTFS or linear Tape File System, allow you to back up to tape and then mount that tape like a thumb drive for instant portability. Lastly is Spectrum Accelerate. This allows the customer the functionality of the IBM XIV on your hardware.

As customers look at the journey to the cloud, many are in such a hurry to get to the cloud that they overlook the possibility that they may have to return from the cloud. IBM Cloud Object Storage, formerly Cleversafe, is a robust offering that allows the customer to manage cloud data to integration with back up and recovery offerings. 

I did save the best for last in discussing IBM Spectrum Compute, formerly Platform Computing. This is the most transformational technology in the offering. IBM Spectrum Compute is born from the high performance-computing arena. With the need to rapidly introduce technologies like Docker, Hadoop, Cloudera, and others having the compute resources available is a must. IBM Spectrum Compute with its intelligent resource sharing turns many devices in to one powerful compute resource. This allow for rapid rollouts of transformational technologies, reductions in capital expenditures, and higher systems availability. 

Although I think that customer will still find value in investing in all flash hardware systems, it is transformational technologies like IBM Spectrum Suite (SDS), IBM Spectrum Compute, IBM Cloud Object Storage and IBM Copy Data Management solutions that will truly make the difference in how companies mange all their important data and allow them to make the next leap to technologies like analytics, Blockchain, internet of things and cognitive. For more information, please visit www.ibm.com/storage