Today's IT environments are a blend of traditional virtualized environments and monolithic workloads but there's a shift taking place now to containerize applications and application services. This is extremely important because applications will become more portable and scalable for both long-term and short-term growth to the cloud. In this new paradigm, businesses can literally scale their applications in minutes to meet the demands of their customers. 

Administrators must be equipped with tools that allow them to support these environments in a flexible yet streamlined way. Unlike in the past, this approach is not favorable to data stored in a dark data center with disparate management systems and little to no automation. To be competitive, businesses must leverage their data in many ways to get quicker results and adapt their processes along the way. The IT administrator will have to hold the keys to the kingdom along with signage stating, “Gone to the cloud and not returning”!
 
While cloud environments are concerned with the economics of streamlining IT, it is also true that operational agility cannot be compromised. This effort to create and maintain tools or scripting for such operational agility is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, organizations are looking for readily available tools that integrate with existing products that can handle automation, provisioning, and orchestration in a altogether and in a seamless work-flow.
 
With IBM Spectrum Connect, Clients can orchestrate between IBM storage systems and cloud by using their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). IBM Spectrum Connect supports defining easy to consume storage classes based upon service level agreements or workload characteristics while also enabling self-service automation to deliver storage provisioning. In addition to IBM storage, IBM Spectrum Connect also supports over 440 different virtualized storage systems from IBM and others, providing consistent management of heterogeneous storage. IBM Spectrum Connect implements a diverse set of APIs under a single-pane for administrators to optimize their tasks:   
• IBM Storage Enabler for Containers, delivering self-service automated provisioning of storage for Containers.
• IBM Storage Provider for VMware VASA which enables monitoring and automation of VMware Hypervisors
• IBM Storage Enhancements for VMware vSphere Web Client, that support provisioning and management for Hypervisors
• IBM Storage Plug-in for VMware vRealize Orchestrator for automation of VMWare Hypervisors.
• IBM Storage Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations Manager, for monitoring VMWare Hypervisors.
• IBM Storage Automation Plug-in for PowerShell that enables Provisioning and management of Microsoft Hypervisors



IBM Spectrum Connect simplifies cloud storage deployments through single point API management and allows easy consumption of IBM storage resources across environments. 
 
IBM Spectrum Connect delivers clear, unique value for clients looking to deploy IBM and heterogeneous enterprise storage in containerized and VMware environments, on-premises and in the cloud.
For more information about IBM Spectrum Connect, click here.


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