Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements! This week IBM announced new and refreshed storage products.
IBM decided to do things a bit differently for this launch. Instead of dozens of stodgy press releases, IBM has opted to complement with a series of blog posts, with [Storage innovation drives 21st century business] providing an overall recap.
- IBM Spectrum NAS
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IBM Spectrum NAS is a new software-defined storage offering to address three specific market segments:
- General purpose file serving and home directories
- Native SMB protocol NAS for Microsoft Windows Applications
- File serving for Virtualization Environments, such as VMware and Hyper-V
IBM Spectrum NAS is software that you can run on your x86 servers, either bare metal or as Virtual Machines. You start with four nodes, and can scale out to tens of machines as you grow.
IBM Spectrum NAS was written from scratch, not based on open source SAMBA software. It has already been deployed internally within IBM last year, and now is being productized. It is very compatible with the SMB2 and SMB3.1 protocol specifications, and supports the NFS3, NFS4 and NFS4.1 protocols as well.
As a scale-out solution, it is both more robust and scalable than a single Windows server, and less expensive to run than traditional dual-controller NAS filers.
To learn more, see the [IBM Spectrum NAS V1.7] press release, and [Easy to manage IBM Spectrum NAS] blog post.
- IBM Spectrum Protect and Protect Plus
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IBM Spectrum Protect has been enhanced to detect ransomware attacks, and improved auditing to meet European Union's General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] privacy legislation.
(If you are not in Europe, and feel this legislation does not apply, you may be sadly mistaken. This legislation may affect any company that shares information with EU companies, or has even a single client from the European Union. Think of it as this year's [Y2K crisis]. It hits globally on May 25, 2018.)
IBM Spectrum Plus offers snapshot support for both VMware and Hyper-V virtualization environments. The vSnap repository can now be replicated to remote facility for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR). IBM Spectrum Plus is now also available as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering on IBM Cloud.
To learn more, see [Innovations just keep on coming with IBM Spectrum Protect and Protect Plus].
- NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF)
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IBM FlashSystem 900 storage system will be enabled for NVMe-oF, initially over InfiniBand. In my January 2018 blog post [NVMe and the future of NVMe-OF and FC-NVMe], I cover these technologies in detail.
IBM also made an official Statement of Direction (SoD) to offer NVMe-oF support on many of its other storage systems as well.
To learn more, see [Driving new level performance with NVMe storage solutions].
- IBM Spectrum Virtualize
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IBM Spectrum Virtualize is the software in SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystem V9000, and the Storwize V7000 and V5000 series. It is also available as software you can deploy on your own x86 servers, or in the IBM Cloud. Fellow IBM master inventor and blogger Barry Whyte has a great post on the details of Spectrum Virtualize v8.1.2 latest release, including [Data Reduction Pools].
To learn more, see [Spectrum Virtualize v8.1.2], [IBM SAN Volume Controller, IBM FlashSystem V9000, and IBM Storwize family], and [New architecture for IBM Spectrum Virtualize].
- IBM Cloud Object Storage System
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Cohasset Associates has reviewed the IBM Cloud Object Storage (IBM COS) Compliance Enabled Vaults (CEV) capability and determined that this feature meets the U.S. Security Exchange Commission SEC 17a-4 requirement for non-erasable, non-rewriteable (NENR) tamperproof enforcement.
Some clients also refer to this as Immutability, Content Addressable Storage, or Write-Once Read-Many (WORM). Rather than invent new terminology, IBM opts to use Non-erasable, Non-rewriteable to match the standard language in the SEC 17a-4 legislation.
IBM COS is now also eligible for "Storage Utility" pricing. See my blog post [ IBM Announcements 2017 November] for details on how Storage Utility pricing is implemented.
To learn more, see [Regulatory Support for IBM COS], and [Storage Utility Pricing for IBM COS].
- IBM Spectrum Connect
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More than 15 years ago, I was the chief architect for IBM Spectrum Control, which back then was called the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center.
A subset of IBM Spectrum Control was needed for a variety of IBM storage products to support VMware in a consistent manner, so IBM made this available as the "Spectrum Control Base Edition", entitled at no additional charge. Last year, IBM also merged in storage enablement for containerized environments like Docker.
Since "IBM Spectrum Control Base Edition with Storage Enablement for containerized environments" is too long to say, IBM shortened this to "Spectrum Connect". In addition to VMware and Docker support, Spectrum Connect also supports Microsoft PowerShell and IBM Cloud Private.
To learn more, see [One stop integration for storage with IBM Spectrum Connect].
- IBM XIV Gen3 and the FlashSystem A9000/R
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In 2016, IBM [announced the IBM FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R] as the official follow-on products for the XIV Gen3.
If you have 11.6.2a microcode on your XIV Gen3, you can now perform Online Volume Migration (OLVM) to FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R systems running 12.2.1 release. This will help clients in their migration efforts.
To learn more, see [A bridge across XIV generations].
Yes, this was a big launch! Send me your thoughts in the comments section below.