IBM Storage for Containers and Hybrid Cloud Gets New Robust Products

IBM storage for containers and hybrid cloud just got a boost with new capabilities and enhancements. A new portfolio of storage software targets Red Hat OpenShift (RHOS) and other environments. This continues a container storage journey that IBM began in 2017.

The new container-native offers address block, file, object, modern data protection and data discovery. Partners need to ride the wave of containers to optimize revenue margin and be more valuable to their customers.

IBM’s Eric Herzog

“All these things in the container world offer huge service opportunities in addition to selling software and systems,” said Eric Herzog, CMO, vice president worldwide storage channels at IBM. “Partners need to be all over this. It’s white-hot and a great way for partners to bolster revenue and margin.”

Challenges Expose Opportunity

Tuesday’s storage news addresses a handful of challenges posed by containers. They include cost, performance, storage across a hybrid cloud environment, availability, the ability to backup and protect, speed to provision, and the ability to scale up and down.

Of course, the new capabilities and enhancements that IBM will roll out address these challenges.

Here are highlights of IBM’s storage advancements.

For partners, this saves time and simplifies support, the company said.

The enhanced offering provides the ability to protect metadata, which allows you to recover applications, namespaces and clusters to a different location. It also expands container-native and container-ready storage support. IBM also announced the availability of a beta of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus on Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Herzog notes that IBM Spectrum Virtualize CSI snapshot supports IBM FlashSystem and more than 500 storage systems.

“What that means is if I have an old EMC VNX2 and a customer wants to work with containers, we can take the VNX2 and give it snapshots as long as they’re using our Spectrum Virtualize software,” he said. “This means better ways for the partner to deploy, save money and offer value.”

DR, Data Protection and More

“Assuming that many big shops are heterogeneous, which they are, we support IBM, Dell EMC Isilon and PowerScale, NetApp FAS and AWS S3,” said Herzog.

The Next Big Thing

The company also announced future plans for adding integrated storage management in a fully container-native software defined solution. No target data is available.

As the latest hot and relevant technology, analysts at Enterprise Strategy Group expect the application container market to reach $7 billion by 2024. Nearly three in four (74%) of organizations have containers in production now or will within the next 12 months.

Herzog warns partners not to fall behind.

“Just the way people started doing clouds — some partners got left behind because they tried to fight it. In this case, containers are here and it’s a growing market.”