IBM’s Eric Herzog, Chief Evangelist and Vice President of Worldwide Storage Channels, briefed us at ESG on the recent IBM Storage announcement launch focused on modernization infrastructure for the edge, core, and hybrid cloud. This post will cover key elements in this launch where IBM’s focus is on Spectrum Fusion HCI and the importance of edge, core, and hybrid cloud as well as simplifying Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes.
OpenShift Makes Kubernetes Easy
When understanding the container ecosystem, part of the attractiveness of Kubernetes is it provides a unified operation to complete the orchestration across multiple clouds. IBM claims with this launch that the Spectrum Fusion HCI makes OpenShift easier to deploy. What’s new is this HCI offering provides Red Hat OpenShift capabilities from inception to deployment. OpenShift applications leverage the storage and hardware platform and the hybrid cloud while providing access to data across the hardware ecosystem.
This launch promises faster business results and a simpler path to hybrid cloud. Herzog discussed how hybrid cloud integration improves the collaboration of applications connecting hybrid cloud data. This connectivity provides the ability to create application and data agility with integration from the data center to public cloud resources.
Simplicity is key. IBM provides a simplified way for data to be accessible from the core to the edge to hybrid cloud to the public cloud. IBM looks for ways to lower infrastructure costs by streamlining operations, delivering hybrid cloud integration and modernizing AI workloads.
Container-native Storage Enabling Hybrid Cloud and AI
As the progression of container adoption and storage continues to gain momentum, IBM provides a new approach to container-native storage. Historically, container-enabled storage provided limited agility and portability. This was largely due to little or no integration with OpenShift operations and management. As container-native storage became available, tighter integration with OpenShift provided additional functionality. With this deployment model also came increased agility.
Today, IBM is increasing functionality to integrate existing storage into new architectures, improve data discovery, increase security and encryption, and provide data protection as well as high availability. This approach addresses the current container-native storage technology gaps.
Addressing Artificial Intelligence, Analytics, & Data Resilience
As artificial intelligence workloads continue to grow, the speed to process the data becomes equally, if not more, important to deliver results. In this launch, the new IBM ESS platforms promise to more than double the AI throughput compared to previous platforms. This includes processing data at 80GB/s per node and linearly scales to terabytes and yottabytes of data capacity at the core, edge, and cloud.
The new platforms also focus on the support of Red Hat OpenShift container storage. The additional capability improves support for elastic storage systems and provides rapid upgradability via automation with Red Hat Ansible.
Responding to Customer and Industry Challenges
In the world of data-driven results, artificial intelligence, data analytics, data resiliency, and the ability for applications to be portable will continue to increase. Businesses looking for ways to optimize the right balance between data sets and information at the core, edge, and cloud will need ways to access this information in an automated approach. IBM introduces interesting approaches to solve these problems, bridging the gaps between existing deployments and offering new ways for innovation and business results. IBM has the potential to solve these challenges in ways the competitive landscape may be overlooking.
Summary
If you are looking at ways to drive data-driven results with AI and containers, check out IBM’s storage announcement. As always, if you would like to continue this conversation, contact me and let’s talk about what IBM is doing as well as how to drive results for your business.
The ESG team is excited about this launch and has covered it in multiple posts, including this post by my colleague Scott Sinclair titled IBM, the Future of Data Storage, and the End of the Array.
