This week IBM Storage announced an expansion of the IBM reference architecture for on-premise blockchain solutions. This announcements centers around being able to leverage cloud-based and on-premises storage solutions for off-chain data. An example of this would be IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS), which can expand your on-premises off-chain data store for your blockchain peer, regardless where your blockchain peer resides.
For all of us just starting to look at Blockchain, there's a couple things to keep in mind, the environment must provide a reliable platform-as-a-service for its users, it leverages IBM Cloud Private, and the IBM Blockchain Platform for IBM Cloud Private. If you want a good place to start looking into Blockchain there is a good place to start, with the [IBM Blockchain for Dummies] publication that gives a good overview of the general technology. Data for a blockchain solution can either be stored on-chain as part of the core ledger managed by the blockchain protocol, or off-chain, using more traditional data stores. Off-chain data is any non-transactional data that is too large to be stored in the blockchain efficiently, or, requires the ability to be changed or deleted.
What's new in this annoucement which is part of the latest version of the [IBM Storage Solutions for Blockchain Platform Version 1.2], is the ability to leverage IBM Cloud Object Storage as an on-prem storage option and the ability to use the IBM Blockchain cloud peer for test and validation. It leverages the IBM Blockchain Document Store that allows secure sharing of documents across multiple participants on a permissioned-blockchain network. It provides an abstraction for handling documents or unstructured data like text, PDF, JPG files and JSON that uses APIs. It also maintains proof of the existence of the documents by using the immutable property of the blockchain and supports verification and secure sharing of the files.
IBM Storage Solutions for blockchain incorporates elements from across the IBM Storage portfolio, including hardware and software components, ordering and installation instructions and support, and several different expansion options. Pretested blueprints tie each solution together with a set of instructions defining each component and providing configuration details. Plus, IBM subject matter experts (SMEs) are available to help clients through their journey. IBM is also deeply involved in developing and offering IT infrastructure solutions designed to enable enterprises of all types and sizes to implement individualized blockchains that leverage both existing data centers systems as well as new technologies and multicloud architectures. One example of this is leveraging the [IBM LinuxONE] for these deployments