Study Shows that Hybrid Storage Plays a Crucial Role in Mitigating Virtualization Issues
There’s a world of difference between how most developers approach cloud computing and what an IT operations team working inside the average enterprise expects. Most developers just want access to IT infrastructure resources as quickly as possible. IT operations teams want to know how those IT resources are going to be managed and secured.
With the requirements specifically in mind, IBM today unfurled an IBM Cloud Object Storage service based on physical servers and dispersed storage technology known as SecureSlice that IBM gained when it acquired Cleversafe last year.
Russ Kennedy, vice president of strategy and customer success for IBM Cloud, says IBM Cloud Object Storage differentiates IBM from other cloud service providers because it slices up data in a way that stores it across cloud instances that are geographically distributed.
“There’s never any downtime,” says Kennedy.
Kennedy says that approach not only makes that data inherently more recoverable and secure than it would be on any other cloud service, but it can store that data at a price point that is 25 percent less than rivals.
In addition to also addressing any compliance issues associated with making sure that data is always available, Kennedy says, IT organizations have the option of being able to deploy the same IBM object storage technology on premise, in a public cloud or across a hybrid cloud. IT organizations will be able to use IBM software-defined storage IBM Spectrum Virtualize software to move data between public and on premise private clouds at will.
Locked in a cloud battle with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, IBM is clearly looking for ways to leverage its strength in traditional enterprise IT organizations to gain market share. Kennedy says that since acquiring Cleversafe, IBM has been tuning the performance of its dispersed storage technology to make it applicable across a distributed cloud computing environment. The challenge now is to make sure that all the traditional issues enterprise IT organizations normally concern themselves with still apply in the selection of a cloud service provider.
