Business success often depends on outpacing the competition and controlling costs. To pursue these goals, companies are rapidly shifting their focus toward container technologies that can enable greater developer productivity and better resource efficiency. According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research study, 41% of companies currently use containers for production application. Another 33% use containers for dev/test and pre-production only, but plan to use containers for production applications in the next 12 months.[1]
This anticipated substantial shift to containers is having an enormous impact on modern data protection. Today's organizations want modern data protection solutions that unify data recovery, retention, and reuse for physical, virtualized, database, application, SaaS, and container-based workloads. Organizations also want a powerful modern data protection foundation to support multiple cloud services and ensure cyber resilience to protect critical data workloads in hybrid cloud environments.
To address these challenges, IBM intends to enhance IBM Spectrum Protect Plus to enrich protection for containers in 4Q 2020. Also, IBM today announces improvements to IBM Spectrum Protect designed to expand cloud options for backup, disaster recovery, and data retention; as well as enhancements that are designed to improve backup and recovery from tape to strengthen its cyber resilience support, both available in 4Q 2020.
IBM intends to enhance IBM Spectrum Protect Plus in the fourth quarter of this year, with the aim of protecting Red Hat OpenShift environments with an integrated experience that starts with the ability to deploy IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Server as a container using a Red Hat OpenShift Operator. IBM also plans to enhance overall Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes modern data protection by adding the ability to protect application, namespace, and cluster metadata, which is designed to provide the ability to completely recover applications, namespaces, and clusters to the same or a different location. This capability supports disaster recovery and data reuse for development, testing, and analytics.
"We believe the ability to protect containers in both Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift environments will play an essential role in providing automation and orchestration for new workloads based on containers. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus' container protection meets our needs with ease of deployment, the ability to ensure complete recovery, and broad storage support".-- Alistair Mackenzie, Predatar.
IBM also intends to enhance IBM Spectrum Protect Plus in 4Q 2020 with expanded storage support that includes support for Container native storage via support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage / Ceph RBD CSI snapshots, and Container ready storage via support for IBM Spectrum Virtualize CSI snapshots, designed to enable support for IBM FlashSystem and 500+ storage systems.
As part of our overall effort to provide storage for Cloud Paks, IBM also intends to integrate IBM Spectrum Protect Plus with the IBM Cloud Pak for Multi-Cloud Management (MCM) in the 4Q 2020 release. The Cloud Pak for MCM is designed to provide centralized performance management, event management, and governance for Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware workloads. With this integration, Kubernetes and Cloud administrators will be able to launch the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus user interface from MCM to configure, manage, and monitor data protection.
"Because information is now our most valuable business resource, data protection has become a critical business task," states Diane Arnold, Managing Director of IBM Business Partner Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. "The new capabilities of the IBM Spectrum Protect portfolio bring enhanced Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes protection, and expanded cloud support that should make them a powerful contributor in our customers' hybrid cloud environments."
IBM is also announcing a beta of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus on Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Support includes Single-click deployment from Azure Marketplace and the same application support as IBM Spectrum Protect Plus on-premises.
The new 4Q 2020 release of IBM Spectrum Protect is expanding the cloud choices for backups, disaster recovery, and data retention by enabling customers to store backup data and Spectrum Protect database backups in Google Cloud Storage. This version also provides an IBM Spectrum Protect S3 interface, which can enable modern applications, such as Cassandra, that support S3 can now back up data directly to IBM Spectrum Protect. This capability is designed to centralize backup data and enable IBM Spectrum Protect customers to further utilize their IBM Spectrum Protect investment. Finally, this new release is designed to optimize operational recovery from tape as customers can create a second copy of their container pool of data in a rehydrated form on tape to begin restores, directly from tape, when needed; while also enabling granular file or application-level recovery from tape.
For an overview of all the IBM Storage announcements on October 27, see this post.
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[1] Source: ESG Research Report: Data Storage Trends in an Increasingly Hybrid Cloud World, 2020.