IBM’s Spectrum brand, which has been used in numerous IBM products since 2015, will be discontinued and replaced by the more recognizable IBM Storage. The move is part of a broader strategy for storage services aimed at greater product integration without requiring customers to assemble various hardware modules.
Denis Kennelly, general manager of storage at IBM, said: .
The first product in this new push is Storage Defender, a backup appliance aimed at fighting ransomware, slated for summer release. Storage Defender combines file and virtual machine backup from Spectrum Protect, object storage backup software from Cohesity’s DataProtect, and container storage management from Spectrum Fusion, all on flash-powered FlashSystem storage arrays.
The plan will also integrate the work of the open source Velero backup project for Kubernetes, which is strongly supported by Red Hat.
Storage Defender relies heavily on AI monitoring of storage equipment activity to detect things like disk errors and the presence of malware and alert administrators, IBM said.
Forrester Research analyst Brent Ellis said: “Such an event vision makes it possible to use snapshots to restore operations with minimal latency.”
“In summary, we don’t have separate systems for cybersecurity monitoring and backup,” said analyst Christophe Bertrand of ESG. “IBM is proposing a cyber surveillance system that will prevent data theft and restore data if it is destroyed.” said to come with
Multiple technologies in one console
Analysts praise the integration of many technologies that previously existed in various forms of storage and had to be purchased separately. FlashSystem arrays now handle backups and can be used for production workloads. This includes storage for containerized applications, thanks to Fusion.
“Bundling Cohesity with the product is a very smart move as it greatly simplifies backups,” said Ellis. “IBM previously sold three products: Spectrum Protect for onsite file backup, Spectrum Protect Plus for virtual machines, and Spectrum Protect Plus Online for data in the cloud. It’s handled from his one console.”
New services also include storage for data and AI and storage for hybrid clouds. The first of these uses storage from Ceph Storage for block, file, and object and IBM Storage Scale (formerly Spectrum Scale) to share file and object storage over the network. Formerly known as elastic storage systems, storage scale systems provide the foundation for storage hardware.
A hybrid cloud provides a hyperconverged infrastructure dedicated to Kubernetes. This will run OpenShift for compute and Fusion for storage. In this configuration, the Fusion Console optimizes resource sharing between applications and makes container migration as easy as possible.
