IBM announced major storage portfolio enhancements aimed at improving data access and management in increasingly complex hybrid cloud environments, resulting in increased data efficiency and resilience.

The solution is expected to combine the tech giant's general parallel file system technology and data security tools to provide companies and their applications with an easy and less complicated way to access data in the data centre, at the edge, and through hybrid cloud environments.

Firstly, the tech giant announced plans to release IBM Spectrum Fusion, a container-native software defined storage (SDS) solution, in the second half of 2021.

Later it announced to make improvements to its IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS) family of high-speed, highly scalable, and easy-to-deploy solutions, including the ESS 5000, which now has 10 percent more storage space, and the latest ESS 3200, which has twice the read performance of its predecessor. In which the IBM ESS includes.

•Global Data Boost: A new 2U storage solution designed to provide data throughput of 80 GB/second per node, which contributes a 100 percent read performance boost over the ESS 3000. The 3200 supports up to 8 InfiniBand HDR-200 or Ethernet-100 ports for high throughput and low latency, will further enhance its performance. Per 2U node, the device can provide up to 367TB of storage space.

•Packing on the Petabytes: The IBM ESS 5000 model has been revised to accommodate 10 percent more density than previously available, resulting in a total storage capacity of 15.2PB. In addition, with the new iteration of Red Hat Ansible, all ESS systems now have streamlined containerized deployment capabilities.

Both the ESS 3200 and ESS 5000 come with containerized device software and support for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI), CSI snapshots and clones, Red Hat Ansible, Windows, Linux, and bare metal environments, as well as Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI), CSI snapshots and clones, Red Hat Ansible, Windows, Linux, and bare metal environments. IBM Spectrum Scale is also included with the devices.

The ESS 3200 and 5000 are also completely integrated with IBM Cloud Satellite to further link edge computing, core data centre, private, and public cloud environments.

Furthermore, the 3200 and 5000 also integrate with IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog (WKC) and Db2 through IBM Cloud Pak for Data, the company's completely containerized platform of integrated data and AI services. Out of which WKC is a cloud-based enterprise metadata repository that will facilitate AI, machine learning, and deep learning by activating data.

As a result, users can view, curate, categorize and share data, knowledge assets and their connections. IBM Db2 for Cloud Pak for Data is a Red Hat OpenShift-based AI-infused data management framework.

When it comes to IBM Spectrum Fusion, the solution is expected to be a container-native hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) framework. It will integrate compute, storage and networking into a single solution when it is launched in the second half of 2021.

Based out of a fully containerized version of IBM's general parallel file system and data protection, the IBM Spectrum Fusion is being developed to provide enterprises with a seamless way to discover data from around the enterprise. Customers can also plan to use the platform to more effectively virtualize and accelerate existing data sets by using the most appropriate storage tier.

To add on to its global capabilities, the IBM Spectrum Fusion is being designed to integrate with IBM Cloud Satellite to help companies completely control cloud resources at the edge, data centre, or in the public cloud with a single management pane. IBM Spectrum Fusion will also be able to manage several Red Hat OpenShift clusters using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager (ACM).

As the use of hybrid clouds increases, so does the need to control the network's edge. According to a recent report from IDC, as digital innovation accelerates IT/OT convergence, the number of new operational processes deployed on edge infrastructure will rise from less than 20 percent today to over 90 percent in 2024.

The report also indicates that by 2022, 80 percent of companies that transition to a hybrid company by design will invest four times more on AI-enabled and stable edge infrastructure to deliver business agility and insights in near real time.

“We manage a large amount of file data that demands extremely high throughput and also block data requiring low response time. It was getting difficult to meet the needs of the business with our existing storage set-up as it had become slow and costly to maintain. IBM Spectrum Scale, with its parallel file system, provides high performance and data throughput to support our applications and data across our growing enterprise, from the data centre to the edge of the network”, said Anil Kakkar, CIO, Escorts Limited.

“It’s clear that to build, deploy and manage applications requires advanced capabilities that help provide rapid availability to data across the entire enterprise from the edge to the data centre to the cloud. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but it starts with building a foundational data layer, a containerized information architecture and the right storage infrastructure”, said Denis Kennelly, General Manager, IBM Storage Systems.

ESS 3200 and 5000 are also fully integrated with IBM Cloud Satellite to further bring together advanced computing, central data centre, public and private cloud environments.