IBM expands Spectrum storage into the cloud

“I’ve been impressed by the way the IBM and Blue Box engineering teams have collaborated to quickly bring Blue Box Cloud to a worldwide infrastructure platform”, said Jesse Proudman, chief technology officer at Blue Box.

Only three months or so ago, the cloud world was interested to learn that IBM, already a strong player in the various open-source cloud initiatives in existence, was acquiring the small but influential OpenStack vendor Blue Box.

It would seem we have an answer to that question today, and IBM is justifiably proud that less than 90 days post acquisition, Blue Box’s offering has been integrated into IBM’s broader portfolio of OpenStack solutions.

Spectrum Protect’s cloud attributes will come in the form of enabling businesses to back up data to the cloud without the need for cloud-gateway hardware such as network appliances or servers. One can speculate that IBM went with the name spectrum, given the fact that their new storage solution gives enterprises tons of options in terms of backup technology.

IBM rebranded several of its storage products under the Spectrum name in February as part of the company’s efforts to revitalize its aging storage software business. IBM Spectrum Protect will be supporting other public clouds in the future.

IBM has been recognized as a “Leader” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances1 for five consecutive years for IBM Spectrum Protect. This means that large enterprises can consolidate backup servers to reduce cost and complexity, while managing data growth from mobile, social and Internet of Things.

More information is available here.

The software-only version of IBM Spectrum Accelerate will include consolidated storage and compute resources on the same servers to reduce costs.

IBM Spectrum Accelerate is now available with portable licensing across XIV systems, on-premises servers, and cloud environments “to offer greater operational flexibility and help support clients as they transform their IT infrastructures to software defined storage”, IBM said.

IBM Corp.’s emerging infrastructure-as-a-service platform now has another major feature over the competition: the ability for organizations to host the off-premise ends of their OpenStack hybrid cloud in its data centers. In fact, Spectrum Storage was built to manage over 300 different storage devices and over a trillion terabytes of data.