Global technology firm IBM is further strengthening its push for the use of hybrid cloud with the launch of new products and services — IBM Spectrum Fusion and IBM’s Elastic Storage System — in its storage portfolio. The innovations are designed to help organizations better manage their data.

To achieve this and address the complexities of hybrid cloud management, IBM will start offering the IBM Spectrum Fusion, a new container-native software-defined storage (SDS) solution or container-native hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) system, by the second half of 2021. Businesses will find it easier to access data — within the data center, at the edge, and across hybrid cloud environments — with the merger of IBM’s general parallel file system technology and data protection software.

“It’s clear that to build, deploy and manage applications requires advanced capabilities that help provide rapid availability to data across the entire enterprise — from the edge to the data center to the cloud,” said Denis Kennelly, GM, IBM Storage Systems. “It’s not as easy as it sounds, but it starts with building a foundational data layer, a containerized information architecture, and the right storage infrastructure.”

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IBM Spectrum Fusion

IBM Spectrum Fusion solutions will also enable organizations to manage a single copy of data and they will no longer be required to create duplicate data when moving application workloads across the enterprise. The solution will ease management functions while streamlining analytics and AI. In addition, data compliance activities like the ones of the General Data Protection Regulation
can be strengthened by a single copy of data, while security exposure from the presence of multiple copies is reduced.

In addition to its global availability capabilities, IBM Spectrum Fusion is being engineered to integrate with IBM Cloud Satellite to help enable businesses to fully manage cloud services at the edge, data center, or in the public cloud with a single management pane. IBM Spectrum Fusion is also being designed to integrate with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager (ACM) for managing multiple Red Hat OpenShift clusters.

IBM’s Elastic Storage System

IBM’s Elastic Storage System (ESS) was also updated. The revamped model ESS 5000 now delivers 10% greater storage capacity and the new ESS 3200 now offers double the read performance of its predecessor.

The IBM ESS 3200, a new 2U storage solution that is designed to provide data throughput of 80 GB/second per node — a 100% read performance boost from its predecessor6, the ESS 3000. Also adding to its performance, the 3200 supports up to 8 InfiniBand HDR-200 or Ethernet-100 ports for high throughput and low latency. The system can also provide up to 367TB of storage capacity per 2U node.

The IBM ESS 5000 model has been updated to support 10% more density than previously available for a total storage capacity of 15.2PB. All ESS systems are now equipped with streamlined containerized deployment capabilities automated with the latest version of Red Hat Ansible. Both the ESS 3200 and ESS 5000 feature containerized system software and support for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI), CSI snapshots and clones, Red Hat Ansible, Windows, Linux, and bare-metal environments. The systems also come with the IBM Spectrum Scale built-in.

The 3200 and 5000 also work with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, the company’s fully containerized platform of integrated data and AI services, for integration with IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog (WKC) and Db2. WKC is a cloud-based enterprise metadata repository that activates information for AI, machine learning, and deep learning. Users rely on it to access, curate, categorize and share data, knowledge assets, and their relationships. IBM Db2 for Cloud Pak for Data is an AI-infused data management system built on Red Hat OpenShift.