- Spectrum Protect Plus 10.1.2
-
Just in time for the upcoming VMworld conference, IBM announces the following features added to Spectrum Protect Plus, a snapshot-based backup software for VMware, Hyper-V and databases.
- Data-at-Rest Encryption for local backups stored in the vSnap repository
- IBM Db2 support with point-in-time recovery
- VMware vSphere 6.7 support
- Dashboard enhancements
- Alerting for backup and restore jobs and storage thresholds limits
- Drill-down capabilities for dashboard widgets
- Spectrum Protect 8.1.6
-
IBM also continues to enhance its traditional file-based backup product. Here are some of the features:
- Tier data by backup state for container pools. When you have multiple backup versions, the most recent version is called the "active", the older versions are called "inactive" versions. Rarely do you recover inactive versions, so this feature allows them to be migrated off to object or cloud storage.
- Ransomware detection for Virtual Environment workloads. This is an enhancement of the "Ransomware detection" introduced earlier this year, but for VMware and Hyper-V images.
- IBM DS8882F All-Flash Array
-
When IBM announced the DS8880, it shocked folks that it changed them from the previous 33-inch wide, to a standard 19-inch width. The IBM Z team followed up with 19-inch wide models of its mainframe servers.
Now, IBM can bring these together. There are two flavors of the new DS8882F:
- The "Rackless" model is 17U in height with the optional keyboard/monitor, and can be put into existing 19-inch racks. These can be used with VMware, Linux, Windows, AIX and z/OS.
- The "Flex Frame" model, which is 16U, allowing it to fit nicely inside a single-rack IBM Z Z14 ZR1 model, or LinuxOne RockHopper II model. It is 16U instead of 17U because it shares the existing 1U-high keyboard/monitor unit.
Like the DS8888F, DS8886F, and DS8884F models, the new DS8882F uses the High Performance Flash Enclosure (HPFE) gen2 drawers, supporting either high-performance/high-endurance drives (400GB to 3.2TB each), or high-capacity/standard-endurance drives (3.8TB to 15.3 TB each).
The R8.5 release of firmware that accompanies this announcement also supports data-in-flight encryption for Transparent Cloud Tiering. It also supports a new feature called "Safeguarded Copies", up to 500 copies to protect against hackers and ransomware.
IBM Spectrum Access blueprints have been extended to support IBM Z and LinuxOne. These blueprints show how to run IBM Cloud Private with Spectrum Connect with IBM block storage, including IBM DS8880/F, SVC, Storwize and FlashSystem models.
- IBM Storage Solutions for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI)
-
IBM offers a new blueprint to configure Virtual Desktops with its newly announced IBM FlashSystem 9100 device. The low latency/high IOPS capability of the FlashSystem 9100 is perfect for the type of "boot storms" that are often encountered with VDI deployments.
- IBM Spectrum Scale 5.0.2 and Elastic Storage Server
-
At recent IBM Technical University, I joked that the IBM Elastic Storage Server is only "part of a complete breakfast" because it only supported the NSD POSIX interface. To make it useful in most situations, you needed to buy additional servers outside of the ESS to run Spectrum Scale protocol nodes to provide industry-standard file and object protocols.
Today, IBM announced that you can order a new "IBM Elastic Storage Server Data Server" (5148-22L) which is a POWER server with the Spectrum Scale software pre-installed for protocol node support. It has [similar specifications] to the IBM Elastic Storage Server Management Server (5148-21L).
If you prefer to run Spectrum Scale in the cloud, you can "Bring your own license" (BYOL) to Amazon Web Services.
To learn more, see [IBM Spectrum Scale Protocol Node Server] press release.
- IBM Cloud Object Storage
-
IBM Cloud Object Storage is software that can be deployed on a variety of x86 servers. Today, IBM announces additional servers qualified for use with this software, including 1U-high Quanta servers.
I will not be attending VMworld this year. If you attend, send me pictures!