We're back with our series IBM Storage Rocks 🚀 highlighting all of the great content, events, and announcements in IBM Storage. Enjoy our curated content to stay informed and in the loop! 

📣 Announcements & Highlights

@Elvia Ramírez highlights the details and technical aspects of the recently released IBM Storage Ceph 9.0 in the blog Announcing IBM Storage Ceph 9.0–The Unified Storage Solution That Seamlessly Powers Enterprise AI with watsonx.data

@Marcel Hergaarden gives an overview of the new features, functions and enhancements, made available with the new release update of IBM Storage Ceph, version 9.0. in the blog IBM Storage Ceph 9.0 released GA

@Aditya Roshan Ramteke showcases how in Ceph 9.0, SMB Multichannel support focuses on improving throughput and resiliency in the blog SMB: Multichannel Feature (Ceph 9.0) and walks through how the SMB colocation feature in Ceph 9.0 significantly enhances the flexibility of Samba deployments by allowing multiple Samba container services to run on a single Ceph node in the blog SMB: Colocation Feature (Ceph 9.0)

🚀 IBM Storage FlashSystem - Live from Warsaw: The future of storage

Join the Livestream on 10 February 2026 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM EST: AI-Driven Dynamic Storage from IBM that is Designed to Protect. Engineered to Adapt. Built to Perform.

The next evolution of storage from IBM is coming-and it's redefining what storage can do for your enterprise. This isn't just faster hardware; it's an AI-driven smarter foundation for your future.

Why this matters for you:

• Amplify expertise with intelligent insights that turn complexity into clarity.
• Stay ahead with systems that learn, adapt, and optimize-before issues arise.
• Ensure governance at scale with automated, real-time policy alignment.
• Protect your data with adaptive defenses that evolve as threats do.

📖New IBM Redbooks

📌Next-generation Enterprise AI Solutions With IBM watsonx.ai and IBM Storage Scale: Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are developing rapidly. The significant advancements in processing power achieved through the latest generations of graphics processing units (GPUs) enable the development and deployment of increasingly complex AI models. This leads to the creation and adoption of large-scale foundation models and large language models (LLMs). These models are the cornerstone for new emerging technologies like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) or Agentic AI. At the core of all of these models is data. The ability to provide high quality data through a fast storage solution is key when committing costly resources and optimizing the IT infrastructure to develop new, high quality solutions. This IBM Redpaper describes the IBM solution for using IBM Storage Scale as enterprise storage with IBM watsonx®.ai. The paper showcases how IBM watsonx.ai® applications can benefit from the enterprise storage features and functions offered by IBM Storage Scale.

📌IBM TS7700 R6.0 Cloud Storage Tier Guide: Building on 25 years of virtual tape experience, the IBM® TS7700 now can store virtual tape volumes in object storage. This IBM Redpaper publication helps you set up and configure the cloud object storage support for IBM Cloud® Object Storage or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The TS7700 supported offloading to physical tape for over two decades. Using a TS7700 to offload to physical tape is a process that is used by hundreds of organizations around the world. By using the same hierarchical storage techniques, the TS7700 also can offload to object storage. Because object storage is cloud-based and accessible from different regions, the TS7700 Cloud Storage Tier support essentially allows the cloud to be an extension of the grid. In this publication, we provide a brief overview of cloud technology with an emphasis on Object Storage. Object Storage is used by a broad set of technologies, including those technologies that are exclusive to IBM Z®. The aim of this publication is to provide a basic understanding of cloud, object storage, and different ways it can be integrated into your environment. This publication is intended for system architects and storage administrators with TS7700 experience who want to add the support of a cloud storage tier to their TS7700 solution.

Check out these discussions in IBM Storage and share your expertise: 

👉Looking for help on converting from CA1 to RMM in a plex, any advice/documenation/presentations/etc posted in the Tape Library group
👉High latency spikes on iSCSI connected FS5040 posted in the Global Storage Forum
👉IBM Storage Protect Server - support for Windows 2025 server posted in the IBM Storage Defender group

📆 Events

3 February | ATG Webcast - IBM Storage Ceph 9.0 Update

10 February | Live from Warsaw - The future of storage: AI-Driven Dynamic Storage from IBM that is Designed to Protect. Engineered to Adapt. Built to Perform.

19 February | ATG Webcast - IBM Storage Fusion - Migration from VMware to Red Hat OpenShift

24 February | ATG Webcast - Protecting OpenShift workloads with IBM Storage Defender & Fusion

26 February | ATG Webcast - IBM Storage Fusion 2.12 - What's new

24 - 25 March 2026 | London, United Kingdom - Storage Strategy Event

🚀 IBM Storage Corner 

@Christopher Maestas and @TERUHIKO KURAHASHI share details from IBM Storage's presence at SCA/HPCAsia 2026 on 26 – 29 January in Osaka, Japan!

The Storage Scale User Group was hosted during SCA / HPC Asia 2026. With AI and HPC accelerating, Storage Scale is gaining more and more attention. For those who couldn't make it to Osaka, the IBM Storage team set up a pop‑up meetup in Tokyo as well - lots of lively discussions with great people from inside and outside IBM. The energy and momentum of this community is truly inspiring!

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IBM TechXchange Community Team
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