Hybrid Cloud Storage – at the Center and «on the Edge»
More and more companies are turning to hybrid clouds to realize or accelerate their digital transformation. This transformation makes securing the permanent availability of business data everywhere in the enterprise a necessity - from the data center to the farthest edge. Today, suitable, high-performance technology is available to leverage both cloud and on-premises resources for data storage.
#IBM #Hybrid Cloud #Cloud Strategy #Container Platform #Container Platform as a Service
The hybrid cloud approach to data storage offers scalability, cost savings, and most importantly, flexibility; whether a company has multiple locations, a global presence, or employees who work from home: A hybrid cloud file storage model makes it possible for users to access business data from anywhere.
However, hybrid cloud storage is also important when it comes to a company's business continuity. It enables the replication of critical data that can be used to continue business operations without interruption in the event of an emergency, within the same cloud and between different cloud providers.
A perfect fit: edge computing and the hybrid cloud
Edge computing, as the name implies, is often deployed far from the data center and produces large amounts of data that are used for analytics and AI, among other things. Edge technology makes it possible to bring computing resources closer to the place where this data is generated. This can dramatically shorten the time to value; it also improves business processes, decision-making and intelligence outside the core IT environment. Edge computing therefore opens up myriad opportunities for the development of new solutions across different industries and for new applications. Improved performance, innovation and cost efficiency are among key benefits. In any case, almost every third company in Europe plans to deploy edge technologies in the next few years. According to a recent IDC study, spending by enterprises and service providers on edge computing will reach around 37.3 billion Swiss francs in 2022 in Europe alone, rising to almost 60 billion Swiss francs by 2025.
Storage products for instant data availability - even at the edge
IBM has developed storage products that are built precisely for the above challenges. These new container-native software-defined storage solutions are designed to extend data availability across complex hybrid clouds, improving an organization's efficiency and resiliency. IBM Spectrum Fusion[ii] is a container-native hybrid cloud data platform for OpenShift that combines IBM's parallel file system technology (Spectrum Scale) and IBM's data protection software (Spectrum Protect Plus). This integrated product simplifies data access and availability from the data center to the edge of the network and in public cloud environments[iii]. IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI is a hyper-converged configuration of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Spectrum Fusion provides a turnkey enterprise solution for deploying Red Hat OpenShift and a hybrid cloud data platform. Applications simply access a local file or directory, but through it access data stored in a public cloud bucket, or even legacy data from a remote system thousands of miles away. IBM Spectrum Fusion's global data access not only preserves existing data, but also provides transparent access that simplifies both DevOps and ITOps. Developers can write applications and access data from one or more applications, or even across different IBM Spectrum Fusion clusters.
Storage technology for the optimization of AI workflows
With IBM Spectrum Fusion solutions, organizations are able to manage a single copy of their data. Data no longer needs to be copied when application workloads are moved across the enterprise. This simplifies data management while streamlining the creation of analytics and AI. In addition, data compliance can be improved by having a single data instance.
IBM Spectrum Fusion can also be used to optimize AI workflows with modern container applications. Data can be processed on the IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI and then used transparently in the cloud (S3 data) or on another IBM Spectrum Scale system using the high-performance ESS 3200 or ESS 3000 NVMe flash system. If a client is using NVIDIA for AI, IBM Spectrum Scale with NVIDIA A100 GPUs and NVIDIA Red Hat Operator can preprocess (or process at the edge) that data and then use it transparently in the cloud or directly on another larger, more compute-intensive NVIDIA DGX A100 system using the IBM ESS 3000 or ESS 3200 high-performance storage system.
IBM and UMB: Bundled storage expertise
UMB is the largest Swiss Platinum Business Partner of IBM and the only IBM Storage and IBM Power Systems Specialty Elite Partner. With well over 350 IBM certifications, UMB has been the strongest IBM partner in Switzerland for years. In addition, the UMB Cloud offers the possibility to realize solutions on a highly flexible and scalable PaaS platform (Platform-as-a-Service), based on leading technologies from IBM and Red Hat. Take advantage of this competence convergence in storage technology, cloud technology and its application. Please contact us for more information.
[iii]Making storage simple for containers, edge and hybrid cloud - Servers & Storage
