File and Object Storage

Join IBM’s Comprehensive Family of Software Defined Storage Solutions

Today, IBM Spectrum NAS becomes an exciting addition to the IBM Spectrum Storage SDS portfolio to help you to modernize and transform your IT environment. Just what does “modernize and transform” mean?

Software-defined storage enables you to modernize and spend less on traditional infrastructure, freeing resources, money, and time to build the transformative software-defined infrastructure you need to underpin your organization’s digital future.

IBM Spectrum NAS is easy-to-manage software-defined file storage for the enterprise that offers:

Simplicity of deployment and administration
• Rapid deployment on bare-metal servers or VMs
• Robust and self-balancing
Lower cost
• Run on commodity x86 servers
• Tailor data sets for efficiency, performance, and protection
Scale-out file storage that grows with you
• Scale performance and capacity in a linear fashion
• Upgrade without downtime
Enterprise NAS features you need
• Native NFS and SMB protocols
• Rich NAS functions

IBM Spectrum NAS is ideal for:
• Reducing costs on general purpose file workloads that currently run on traditional NAS
• Modernizing your organization’s storage infrastructure to software defined storage

The essential uniqueness of IBM Spectrum NAS is its innovative, modern architecture.

IBM Spectrum NAS brings a superior architecture for software-defined general purpose NAS. IBM Spectrum NAS has been architecturally and organically implemented from the ground up for general purpose NAS workloads that require:

• Excellent ease of use
• Scalability
• Multi-protocol SMB and NFS access
• High SMB compatibility
• Good performance



The architectural design of IBM Spectrum NAS features a unique combination of characteristics that provide a differentiated software-defined architecture for building scalable, easy-to-use, general purpose NAS for the future.

These architectural characteristics include:
• A robust data store using erasure code for scalability and efficiency
• A virtual file system layer specifically designed to provide functionalities such as SMB transparent failover, storage of multi-protocol access control, and specification of data protection granularity down the individual file level: you can now have your application specify and drive the data protection level for individual files, rather than have it limited by the capabilities of the storage system.
• An protocol layer specifically designed for high compatibility with SMB and NFS.
• Fully distributed architecture for scalability. All nodes perform all roles to avoid scalability bottlenecks.
• Written specifically to meet quality objectives for system integration, high ease of use, and high compatibility with the SMB and NFS specifications.
• Software stack designed to assure keeping the system core small, efficient, and clean. No dependencies on open source software or third-party libraries
• No single point of failure and self-tuning for maximum uptime and rapid recovery from hardware failures

Based on this architecture, IBM Spectrum NAS offers a rich feature set with industry-leading ease of use, all deployed from a single ISO for rapid installation of a cluster.



Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, noted, “As companies look to control costs in the wake of substantial file data growth, IBM Spectrum NAS provides a strong option with its native SMB and NFS protocol support and its scale-out software-defined storage architecture. By supporting both bare metal and virtual machines deployments, Spectrum NAS delivers infrastructure flexibility enabling the consolidation of multiple filers in a single storage pool with a host of enterprise features, such as multi-tenant support, erasure coding, tiering, and anti-virus integration.”

IBM Spectrum NAS has a very rich set of functions today. More importantly, as these features grow over time, you can rest assured that improvements are being rigorously implemented upon an architecture that will preserve and provide these functions at scale, with high availability and enterprise-grade robustness, to help you drive your digital transformation to a data-driven future. Of course, this is all backed by IBM’s renowned support and services.

Click here to learn more about IBM Spectrum NAS.

For complete information about the IBM Storage announcements on February 20, see our blog.