IBM sprays storage improvements across its Spectrums Blocks and Files – Blocks and Files

IBM has announced enhancements across its Spectrum storage software products, supporting Azure, boosting AIOps, speeding data to GPUs and adding a larger proprietary flash drive.

The news was revealed in an IBM blog with no identified author.

The blog summed things up by blandly announcing: Today, IBM is announcing new capabilities and integrations designed to help organisations reduce IT complexity, deploy cost-effective solutions and improve data and cyber resilience for hybrid cloud environments.

The announcements cover Spectrums Virtualize, Protect, Protect Plus, Scale, AIOps for FlashSystem and the ESS 3200, which runs Spectrum Scale software.

Spectrum Virtualize is the operating, management and virtualization software used in the Storwize and FlashSystem arrays and SAN Volume Controller. The Storwize brand was absorbed into the FlashSystem brand in February 2020.

Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud (SVPC) is available for the IBM public cloud and was made available on AWS in April 2019, providing a hybrid on-premises-to-AWS capability; its been a long time coming to Azure. IBM announced a forthcoming beta program for Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud on Azure in February this year and now, eight months later, the software is generally available.

That means on-premises FlashSystem and SAN Volume Controller deployments can have public cloud-based disaster recovery sites, can migrate data to SVPC in the cloud and support what IBM calls cloud DevOps. This set of disaster recovery, migration and cloud DevOps facilities can function between public clouds as well.

SVPC on Azure supports IBM Safeguarded Copy, which automatically creates isolated immutable snapshot copies designed to be inaccessible by software. That means it functions as ransomware data protection.

Will we see SVPC supporting the Google Cloud Platform? We think so.

IBMs FlashSystem AIOps capabilities are being boosted by acquired Turbonomic AI-powered Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) software technology.

In effect we have IBMs response to HPEs industry-leading InfoSight system monitoring and predictive analytics technology. IBM says:

Big Blue says this reduces the need for over-provisioning the arrays and means their density can be increased, by up to 30 per cent on average, with no performance impact. That is surely good news.

It gets better for FlashSystem users with Instana, Red Hat OpenShift, VMware m vSphere or other major hypervisors, since Turbonomic will observe the entire stack from application to array. In IBM speak, This enables all operations teams to quickly visualise and automate corrective actions to mitigate performance risk caused by resource congestion, while safely increasing density.

Other IBM storage news:

There are no public numbers to allow a comparison with other GDS supporting suppliers such as DDN, Pavilion, VAST Data and WekaIO.

In March we reported that Spectrum Scale delivered 94GB/sec to Nvidia GPUs across GDS. A 100 per cent increase would take this to 188GB/sec still shy of Pavilions 191GB/sec.

Read the rest here:
IBM sprays storage improvements across its Spectrums Blocks and Files - Blocks and Files

Related Posts

Comments are closed.