Big Blue storage cloud is bad news for rivals
IBM is going to become a cloud storage provider with an XIV-based Smart Business Storage Cloud and a private cloud Information Archive, unifying disk and tape.
Big Blue says it “absolutely plans to have a significant place in the cloud storage space,” and this is its marker, emblazoned with XIV and BladeCenter.
It dismissively characterises most existing low entry price storage clouds as being been limited to ‘sandbox’ use cases for secondary or tertiary copies of data, or for use in development and test environments. The data is not frequently accessed and doesn’t grow to massive scale. In other words, it is not remotely mission-critical or enterprise grade.
Smart Business Storage Cloud
Its Smart Business Storage Cloud is a private cloud offering, using low-cost components in a scale-out clustered model. The components include XIV storage arrays and BladeCenter servers, plus IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS)
There is support for multiple petabytes of capacity, billions of files in a single global namespace and scale-out performance previously limited, Big Blue asserts, to the largest high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
It supports existing file access methods and, IBM says, is highly secure and built to make use of a customer’s “existing security and authentication infrastructure.”
via Big Blue storage cloud is bad news for rivals • The Register.
