IBM is introducing a new cloud object storage service that redefines the security, availability and economics of storing, managing and accessing massive amounts of digital information across hybrid clouds.
The company’s new IBM Cloud Object Storage offering derives from IBM’s acquisition of Cleversafe and its significant portfolio of patents which are designed to deliver clients better value with industry-leading security.
Though organisations are flocking to the cloud for improved efficiencies and IT agility, clients see a gap in their ability to store increasingly larger volumes of data – on premises and off premises. Presently companies have to choose between storing data on internal servers and storage systems, or in the cloud. It’s a dilemma that has hindered business flexibility and raised infrastructure costs. As data volumes continue to grow across industries, the need to create flexible hybrid cloud storage solutions has intensified.
The new IBM Cloud Object Storage storage-as-a-service offerings will enable clients for the first time to scale large unstructured data volumes across on-premises systems as well as public and private clouds quickly and easily. This will dramatically increase IT system flexibility and security. In a price comparison of identical object storage capacity running on a competitive cloud, the new IBM Cloud Object Storage demonstrated more than 25% lower costs for the capacity, environment and locations compared.
Built on an SecureSlice from Cleversafe, (acquired by IBM in 2015), IBM Cloud Object Storage is designed to make storing and managing that data on the IBM Cloud reliable and available across regions and around the clock.
“As clients continue to move massive workloads to hybrid clouds there is a need for an easier, more secure and economical way to store and manage mounting volumes of digital information,” says Robert LeBlanc, senior vice-president at IBM Cloud. “With this announcement, IBM becomes the leading cloud vendor to provide clients the flexibility and availability of object data storage across on-premises and public clouds.”
At the heart of the new IBM Cloud Object Storage service is IBM’s innovative SecureSlice, which combines encryption and erasure coding for greater security and information dispersal which enhances data availability.
These fundamental technologies can help clients satisfy their data compliance security requirements and maintain access to critical data even in the face of a regional outage. These capabilities are also delivered without having to make expensive copies of data, resulting in improved economics to clients.
Specifically, they are:
* Security – IBM is the only company to have combined erasure coding with encryption and decryption. When data comes into the IBM Cloud Object Storage system, SecureSlice automatically encrypts each segment of data before it is erasure coded and dispersed. The content can only be re-assembled through IBM Cloud’s “Accesser” technology at the client’s primary data centre, where the data was originally received, and decrypted by SecureSlice.
* Availability – Because of these innovations, IBM Cloud Object Storage can tolerate even catastrophic regional outages without interruption of access to data or the need for customer intervention. Continuous availability is inherent in the architecture. Some traditional cloud storage providers, place the burden of data management and the cost for creating and maintaining a second copy for regional fault tolerance on the client.
* Economics – As a result of the technology’s robust hybrid capabilities, IBM Cloud Object Storage has demonstrated it can, for the compared capacity, environment and locations, reduce certain overall costs of cloud storage. For example, based on internal IBM testing comparing IBM Cloud Object Storage Vault Cross-Region Services to a leading vendor in head-to-head Cross Region service managing 1/2 petabyte (PB) of data, the IBM solution was close to 24% less expensive for the location and workload compared, and at 5PB the service was more than 25% less expensive.
IBM Cloud Object Storage is offered in two public, multi-tenant services: Cross Region Service, which sends the sliced data to at least three geographically dispersed regions across IBM Cloud data centres; and Regional Service, which holds the data in multiple data centres in a given region.
Both the Regional and Cross Region services provide SecureSlice, encrypted erasure coding to protect the data. The new services complement the company’s existing IBM Cloud Object Storage System for on premises object storage, and the IBM Cloud Object Storage Dedicated Service, a private cloud offering that runs on bare-metal servers.
All of the IBM Cloud Object Storage services on or off-premises support Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift interfaces for greater programming flexibility.
for the first time, IT organisations with on-premises storage will be able to move data seamlessly to and from the cloud. IBM Spectrum Virtualize will add hybrid cloud capabilities to nearly 400 platforms, both IBM and non-IBM. IBM Spectrum Virtualize, IBM Spectrum Protect and IBM Spectrum Scale, use Transparent Cloud Tiering to extend traditional storage to the cloud with policy driven, automated simplicity, security and control.
