IBM Leverages Cleversafe Acquisition to Spin Out Cloud Object Storage Service

A new service aimed at helping organizations manage and access data across hybrid clouds was introduced today by IBM. The new as-a-service model offering — IBM Cloud Object Storage — enables organizations to distribute data slices across on-premises servers and storage systems to IBM public and private clouds while providing flexibility and security, according to IBM.

The new service rollout leverages SecureSlice technology from IBM’s acquisition of Cleversafe, a developer and manufacturer of object-based storage software and appliances, in November 2015. SecuresSice combines encryption, erasure coding and geo-dispersal of data for enhanced security, flexibility and availability across clouds, IBM stated.

The new IBM Cloud Object Storage service supports existing Cleversafe on-premises and dedicated offerings, and supports unstructured data volumes.

“As clients continue to move massive workloads to hybrid clouds there is a need for an easier, more secure and economical way to store and manage mounting volumes of digital information,” said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president, IBM Cloud.

IBM has made no bones about touting its new strategic direction — cognitive business solutions, which translates into Watson + analytics, and significant amounts of data.

Business customers can choose from three flavors of the new service: Standard, which is a high-performance public cloud offering based on IBM Cleversafe technology with new S3 object storage API interfaces; Vault, which provides cloud infrastructure for infrequently accessed data and is recommended for archive, back up, and other workloads delivered across select IBM Cloud data centers; and, Dedicated, which is a single-tenant IBM Object Storage system running on dedicated servers in IBM Cloud data centers. This option is available as an IBM managed service or as a self-managed cloud solution to give clients access to object storage with no need for extra hardware or data center space.{ad}

IBM Cloud Object Storage is offered in two public, multitenant services: Cross Region Service, which sends the sliced data to at least three geographically dispersed regions across IBM Cloud data centers; and Regional Service, which holds the data in multiple data centers in a given region. Both the Regional and Cross Region services provide SecureSlice, encrypted erasure coding to protect the data. The new services complement the company’s existing IBM Cloud Object Storage System for on-premises object storage, and the IBM Cloud Object Storage Dedicated Service, a private cloud offering that runs on bare-metal servers on IBM Cloud. All of the IBM Cloud Object Storage services on or off-premises support Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift interfaces for greater programming flexibility, according to IBM.

The new service is available for enterprise clients across IBM Cloud data centers in the U.S. and Europe. Availability in the Asia Pacific region in slated for December.