IBM Bets Big on Software-defined Storage

IBM plans to invest $1 billion over the next five years to develop next-generation technologies for software-defined storage. IBM intends to focus this investment on R&D of new cloud storage software, object storage and open standard technologies including OpenStack.

The IBM Spectrum Storage portfolio, which already incorporates more than 700 patents held by the company, will be directed toward helping enterprises transform to a hybrid cloud business model.  IBM will provide a single dashboard for managing massive amounts of data across any media from flash storage to tape and cloud for the lowest cost.  Already, IBM’s Spectrum Storage portfolio can centrally manage more than 300 different storage devices and yottabytes of data.

IBM will also further its efforts to extract intelligence from its traditional storage hardware products enabling clients to use it in any form – as-a-service, as an appliance, or, as software. IBM Spectrum Accelerate, which is the first software product that the company has based on the software from its XIV high-end storage appliance, enables clients to layer their infrastructure with intelligent features derived from XIV. These features include unique architecture with zero-tuning that can help clients dynamically add storage capacity in minutes versus the months it takes today to add, install and run storage hardware systems. The software can help provide business continuity upon disaster for all committed data, compared to the risk of losing 15 minutes of data or more with certain other competing storage software. Both speed and data protection are essential to clients in data-driven industries such as financial services, healthcare, retail and telecommunications as they seek to deploy new workloads on the hybrid cloud.

"A new approach is needed to help clients address the cost and complexity driven by tremendous data growth.  Traditional storage is inefficient in today’s world where the value of each piece of data is changing all the time,” said Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President, IBM Systems. “IBM is revolutionizing storage with our Spectrum Storage software that helps clients to more efficiently leverage their hardware investments to extract the full business value of data.”

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/46093.wss