Highlights:

  • IBM storage for containers and hybrid cloud launched an enhanced product portfolio.
  • A novel product portfolio of storage software targets Red Hat OpenShift (RHOS).
  • IBM also announced the availability of the beta of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus on Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
  • IBM is planning to add support for end-to-end (E2E) NVMe with VMware 7.
  • Analysts at Enterprise Strategy Group estimated the application container industry to account for about USD 7 billion by 2024.

IBM storage management

IBM storage management for containers and hybrid cloud just got a boost with its enhanced capabilities globally. A novel product portfolio of storage software targets Red Hat OpenShift (RHOS) and others.

The new container-native offers address block, modern data protection, file, data discovery, and object. Thus, the partners need to ride the wave of containers to optimize revenue margin and be more valuable to their consumers.

Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Global Storage Channels – IBM Storage Division, commented: “All these things in the container world offer huge service opportunities in addition to selling software and systems.” He further added, “Partners need to be all over this. It’s white-hot and a great way for partners to bolster revenue and margin.”

Challenges posed by containers

They comprise the ability to scale up and scale down, cost, speed to provision, performance, ability to backup and protect, and storage across a hybrid cloud environment.

Highlights of IBM’s storage advancements

In this quarter, IBM’s Spectrum Protect Plus product will protect Red Hat OpenShift. Thus, the product does not need a virtual engine and a container. A Spectrum Protect Plus server could be organized as a container using a certified Red Hat OpenShift operator.

The company further said this saves time and streamlines support for partners.

The advanced platform offers the ability to protect metadata, enabling one to recover namespaces, applications, and clusters to several locations. Also, it expands container-ready and container-native storage support. IBM also announced the availability of the beta of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus on Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Herzog states, “IBM Spectrum Virtualize CSI snapshot supports IBM FlashSystem and more than 500 storage systems.”

“What that means is if I have an old EMC VNX2 and a customer wants to work with containers, we can take the VNX2 and give it snapshots as long as they’re using our Spectrum Virtualize software.” He further added, “This means better ways for the partner to deploy, save money and offer value.”

Disaster recovery, data protection, and more

  • IBM Spectrum Protect Plus will help with disaster recovery and data protection for businesses putting containers in production.
  • IBM Spectrum Scale launched container-native storage access for Red Hat OpenShift. Thus, the product features high-performance data access with enterprise data services for the RHOS platform. This plays a vital role in artificial intelligence (AI) and big data running in production environments.
  • IBM’s present container-native Spectrum Discover product gains new sources such as IBM Cloud Digest Storage File Access and Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage.

Herzog commented: “Assuming that many big shops are heterogeneous, which they are, we support IBM, Dell EMC Isilon and PowerScale, NetApp FAS and AWS S3.”

  • IBM plans to add support for end-to-end (E2E) NVMe with VMware 7 for faster read and write access to externally stored data to enhance the performance. Also, Flashsystem 7200 and 9200 will gain three times more storage class memory capacity.
  • The IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks is designed to expand support for container-native data access on CoreOS and OpenShift.

Future ideas

The company shared its future plans of adding integrated storage management in a fully-container-native software-defined solution.

Analysts at Enterprise Strategy Group estimated the application container industry to account for about USD 7 billion by 2024.

Herzog added, “Just the way people started doing clouds — some partners got left behind because they tried to fight it. In this case, containers are here, and it’s a growing market.”