In the age of exponential data growth, managing long-term data retention while balancing cost, compliance, and recovery demands has become a formidable challenge. IBM Storage Defender Data Protect is a comprehensive data resilience platform when integrated with the IBM Storage Deep Archive on Diamondback, delivers a seamless, policy-based archiving to cost-efficient, ultra-reliable tape.
The Tape Storage Renaissance
While the simplicity and standardization of cloud have been the growth driver for over a decade, Tape has shown surprising resilience and even a resurgence in certain industries and geographies. While the durability and cost effectiveness of tape is undeniable, the complexity and manual intervention has always been weighing down on its growth. The IBM solution leverages the inherent strengths of tape technology via standard S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval storage class presenting the best of both worlds for organizations dealing with massive data archives.
Key Benefits
- Unmatched Durability and Reliability Tape media offers exceptional long-term data preservation, with the ability to maintain data integrity for decades.
- Cost-Effective Long-Term Storage Tape storage provides an incredibly low-cost solution for massive data archives, with significantly reduced per-terabyte storage expenses compared to traditional disk-based systems.
- Impressive Scalability IBM Storage Deep Archive on Diamondback demonstrates remarkable scalability, supporting up to 27PB of data. This makes it an ideal solution for enterprises with massive archival requirements.
- Compliance and Security The solution meets critical industry compliance requirements, offering air-gapped, immutable, tamper-proof storage that's perfect for sensitive data. This feature is crucial for industries with stringent regulatory standards.
- Simplicity of the S3 Glacier interface The S3 Glacier interface transforms tape archiving from a complex, manual error-prone process into a simple, reliable, and efficient data management workflow. With automated data tiering from object for both backup and recovery, no tape specific skills required.
IBM Storage Defender Data Protect
IBM Defender Data Protect is a modern Data Security platform delivering Data Protection, Cyber resiliency and hybrid cloud flexibility – all while simplifying backup, recovery, and long-term data retention. Built as a zero-trust-platform, it comes with Immutability, Encryption, RBAC, Quorum controls integrated with advanced ML-based Ransomware detection. Built on a scale-out architecture, it offers the efficiency of linear scalability while enabling instant mass recovery at scale.
Deep Dive into Advanced Archiving Capabilities
Key Features:
Policy-Based Archival: Intelligent Data Lifecycle Management
The solution goes beyond traditional backup strategies by implementing sophisticated, policy-driven archival mechanisms. IBM Defender Data Protect offers:
- Granular policy controls for data retention
- Automated tiering and movement of data
- Compliance-driven retention and deletion policies
S3 Interface Simplicity: Bridging Modern and Traditional Storage
The S3 interface represents a revolutionary approach to tape archiving, providing:
- Seamless integration with cloud-native architectures
- Abstraction layer that simplifies complex storage operations
- Compatibility with existing cloud and on-premises workflows
Object-Based Tape Class: Modernizing Tape Storage
Inspired by cutting-edge approaches to tape archiving, this feature transforms traditional tape storage by:
- Treating tape as a first-class object storage tier
- Enabling direct object-level interactions with tape media
- Supporting complex data access patterns without physical tape manipulation
Instant Recovery: Minimizing Data Access Latency
Advanced recovery capabilities include:
- Rapid data retrieval from tape archives through private SAS connections providing 400MB/sec native data rates and NVMe flash storage in the caching nodes
- Intelligent caching and tiering mechanisms after data is read from tape
- Metadata-driven quick access to archived data
Conclusion
The IBM Defender Data Protect with IBM Storage Deep Archive on Diamondback represents a sophisticated approach to long-term data storage. By combining the reliability of tape technology with the simplicity of S3 interfaces, IBM has created a solution that addresses the critical challenges of modern data archiving. Organizations looking to optimize their long-term data storage strategy, this solution offers a compelling blend of performance, security, and cost-effectiveness.
For more information, follow the links below:
Solution Brief: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/documents/us-en/131cf87890331521
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-deep-archive/1.0.0
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-deep-archive/1.0.0?topic=overview-components