IBM Broadens Storage Software Support to Dell EMC Isilon, NetApp, Amazon S3

IBM has bolstered its data storage offerings for channel partners and customers by introducing new support for competing hardware in its IBM Spectrum Discover application, as well as new capabilities and updates for the company’s IBM Cloud Object Storage products.

In addition, the company has also added enhancements to IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, including integration with IBM tape products to provide air gap protection for data; support for Amazon Glacier, Azure archive and IBM Cloud Object Storage archive tier; and new disaster recovery from backup repositories running on Amazon AWS. Other improvements include a new user interface and additional language translations. All of the improvements are aimed at making things easier for partners to help customers perform needed operations in hybrid multicloud environments.

IBM’s Eric Herzog

In the past, the IBM Spectrum Discover metadata management software could only be used with IBM object storage hardware or IBM spectrum scale hardware, Eric Herzog, the chief marketing officer for IBM storage, told Channel Futures.

Now, however, IBM customers will now be able to take advantage of heterogeneous storage for IBM Spectrum Discover through new support gained by connectors for Dell EMC Isilon, NetApp, Amazon S3, Ceph, and other S3- and NFSv3-compliant data sources, said Herzog.

“This is really important for partners because the bulk of the top 2,500 customers in the world are mostly heterogeneous in their storage, so this is a big benefit to partners who sell to them,” said Herzog.

A wide range of new content-based data classification and tagging capabilities have also been added, giving users the ability to extract metadata from more than 1,000 different file types. Another new feature is the ability to automatically detect certain types of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other types of sensitive data that can help organizations manage their data in compliance with GDPR and other regulations.

IBM Spectrum Discover provides unified metadata management and insights for file and object storage on-premises and in the cloud for unstructured data. It can be used to connect to IBM cloud object storage and to IBM Spectrum Scale, a clustered file system application.

For channel partners, the enhanced storage capabilities and features in the IBM storage software offer huge AI and big data market opportunities to increase their services to customers, said Herzog.

“It’s new, so obviously partners need to get educated about it all, particularly the AI parts,” he said. The potential revenue gains are real, he added, with IDC estimating the market for storage alone in the AI market at $4.75 billion in 2019.

“That’s the opportunity,” he said. “That’s why we have things like Spectrum storage and IBM object storage to help partners to deliver to end users.”

Under the new enhancements, IBM Cloud Object Storage gains Gen 2 improvements through a new architecture for object storage that’s scalable to over 10 PB in a single rack, as well as more flexibility for the creation of tailored configurations that meet unique requirements for performance or capacity.

CAS Severn’s Joseph King

Joseph King, the chief technology officer and vice president for presales and technology services for CAS Severn, a VAR/MSP and IBM channel partner, said the IBM storage updates will help his company better serve its customers with these needed services.

“Our clients are looking to be in charge of their own multi hybrid cloud journey and one of those steps is establishing an object storage presence for unstructured data,” he said. “The newer dense or smaller offerings will allow more of my customers to take advantage.”

King said the new IBM tools and features are at the core of a …