Gartner says that 70% of existing storage solutions will be available as software only in 2019. And in 2020, about 70 to 80% of unstructured data will be positioned in the entry-level storage management software instances with a software- defined.
To seize this opportunity, IBM is the first company to launch a detailed plan and accelerated to extract information from its hardware products traditional storage, allowing users to use it in any format: as a service, as a device or software.
It is with this objective that IBM announced that it will spend $1 billion over five years to expand its portfolio of storage solutions. The proposed investment will focus on research for new cloud storage software, Object storage and open standard technologies, including OpenStack.
First steps in this major initiative is the launch of the IBM Storage Spectrum, the software layer to its high-end storage appliance named XIV. XIV is intended for companies working on Big Data projects and high-level storage needs. But above all, XIV offers the same data transfer standards in its private cloud than public cloud. IBM Storage Spectrum includes connectors for working with the great names of public cloud including OpenStack and VMware vCloud. IBM says that especially Storage Spectrum manages over 300 heterogeneous storage devices and data yottabytes.
The objective of the new solution is to change the organizational and economic principles of storage management and adding to it the intelligent software. The aim is to offer tools to users to enable them to optimize the footprint data minimizing their cost (up to 90% in some environments) and maximizing performance, while meeting the desired standards in level of security.
IBM Spectrum Storage includes more than 700 patents. The solution will help customers transform business model and move to a hybrid cloud platform through centralized management of data, regardless of where and how they are handling and thanks to a quick and easy-to-use control panel.
The software also ensures business continuity. Both speed and data protection are essential for such important sectors including financial services, healthcare, retail and telecommunications industry, as they seek to deploy new workloads in hybrid cloud. IBM plans to introduce this year along a connector for multiple clouds as a software functionality in IBM Storage Spectrum. In this way organizations can migrate data dynamically between multiple clouds with no loss of confidentiality and security.
With the increase in demand for data storage in the cloud, IBM wants to speed up its action plan that extracts intelligence from its storage hardware, allowing the user to discover all its forms.
IBM competitor EMC is one of the leader in software-defined storage space. Last year, the company announced new storage ECS appliancedesigned to compete with massively distributed major cloud providers storage services, which aims to change the economics of cloud storage for customers and service providers, regardless of industry and enterprise.
[Source:- cloudtimes]
