New enhancements and certification process leverages modern server technologies and new integration with IBM products leverage additional backup environmentsData is a valuable asset and the amount of data kept online and accessible continues to expand. It’s no secret that the amount of data is expanding in the enterprise, IDC predicts that by 2025 the Digital Universe of data created in the world annually is forecasted to be 180 Zettabytes*. The problem is as this data expands that large data repositories can be costly to deploy, expansive to maintain and many times difficult to manage. Companies usually create islands of data and many times each island is at various stages of the technology spectrum making it more difficult to maintain and integrate. Data can also be locked away and difficult or time consuming to access.
IBM Cloud Object Storage continues to focus on these big data challenges and enhance the portfolio and bring more values to our customers.
New hardware verification processIBM Cloud Object Storage currently supports over 40 different hardware configurations using a selection of various models and vendors including IBM, HPE, Seagate, Cisco, Dell, and Lenovo. Previously each new hardware servers needed to go through a lengthy verification test by IBM to ensure the supportability of the combined hardware with IBM Cloud Object Storage software. This verification could take many months to perform. Effective immediately any X86 server can be verified as a configuration within weeks by working directly with IBM and running a set of validation checks and sending the results to IBM. Once verified, IBM will add the new server into the supported configuration and then the hardware can be used as a valid platform to leverage IBM Cloud Object Storage software. This process has already been leveraged and resulted in a 1U Quantum server as a new validated configuration. This means a customer can now create a 72TB configuration in a single or 3 site configurations with only 3 x 1U servers using IBM Cloud Object Storage software. That is only 3u for an entry level object storage system that can grow online and never go down even when upgrading to exabyte scale. JT Wood, Senior Offering Manager for IBM Cloud Object Storage remarked, “This new process from IBM is expected to bring many new hardware options to our customers to leverage the hardware of their choice for our software. We have had many requests for our software to run on more hardware platforms and this new validation process will open the door to many more configurations.”
New software update for software-defined modernizationIBM is also announcing an updated version of the Cloud Object Storage software (3.14) which when released later in Q3 will support newer models and hardware capabilities. We expect to increase the number of hardware models supported dramatically in the near future. This new update will allow for the most advanced servers from hardware vendors such as Lenovo with their SR630 or SR650 servers. This also paves the way for supporting future technologies, such as NVMe and larger or more efficient storage servers and disk drives.
About IBM Cloud Object StorageIBM Cloud Object Storage breaks down many of the traditional barriers for storing massive amounts of data by creating a modern and transformational approach to storage. By combining scalability, availability, reliability, efficiency, simplicity and security into a proven platform, IBM has been winning with customers around the globe and in most industries. With greater reliability, availability and efficiency than traditional storage, it’s the perfect match for storing massive amounts of data. Relied upon by some of the world’s largest repositories and ranked a leader in object storage by both Gartner and IDC and #1 for all object storage use cases, our proven solutions turn storage challenges into business advantages.
IBM Cloud Object Storage is a great solution for remote file collaboration, backup or an active archive repository. Increasingly its becoming a large content repository for images, video, voice or IoT and other analytics data. One of the advantages for customers with the IBM Cloud Object Storage architecture is that as more use cases are put on the system, the more benefits and efficiencies can be realized. More is better with IBM Cloud Object Storage.
Clients can start with as few as three commodity x86 server nodes or as little as 72 TB of useable storage and grow to petabytes or even to exabytes without losing access to the data or ever going off line. By combining a single copy of protected data and the ability to lock down data using policy-based WORM storage, this solution is becoming a choice in many industries like finance, healthcare and government that have compliance or other data retention requirements.
Across the entire portfolio, IBM is focused on providing industry-leading storage innovation to enable more efficient and agile multicloud solutions for our worldwide customer and partner base. Learn more about how your IT team can leverage the new multicloud capabilities to reduce costs, improve agility, and accelerate the success of your enterprise at our
announcement webinar or at VMworld, booth 1312.
Source: *https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2016/08/05/iot-mid-year-update-from-idc-and-other-research-firms/#56776d8d55c5. #backupandrecovery#CloudObjectStorage#Cloudstorage#Multicloud