IBM Acquires Cleversafe for Object Storage

In a sign that object storage is going mainstream inside both traditional enterprise data centers as well as the cloud, IBM (IBM) announced it is acquiring Cleversafe for an undisclosed amount.

Jim Comfort, general manager of IBM Cloud, said that while usage of object storage clearly got its start in the cloud, the proliferation of data types in the era of big data is pushing IT organizations toward object storage systems that can handle a wide variety of data types.

In the case of IBM, Comfort said solution providers and their customers should expect the company to layer Cleversafe's object storage technology under IBM software-defined storage software currently spanning traditional file systems. Longer term, Comfort said Cleversafe technologies will be integrated into the IBM Cloud portfolio to enhance IBM’s SoftLayer cloud services, which at the moment primarily makes use of storage technologies defined within the OpenStack cloud computing framework.

Perhaps the most unique attribute of the Cleversafe approach to object storage is that it makes use of a dispersed storage architecture that enables data to be sliced up and stored in multiple locations. Not only does that make it simpler to deploy object storage at levels of scale involving exabytes of data, it also helps IT organizations secure that data by dispersing it across multiple servers. Hackers may compromise one of those servers, but they won’t be able to reconstitute all the data dispersed across multiple servers to make any sense of it.

As the volume and types of data IT organizations are being asked to manage continues to expand and proliferate, the more predisposed they are to evaluating next-generation storage systems. Just as significantly, they will need an object storage system that can span both on-premise and public cloud computing deployments. In fact, it’s difficult to see how true hybrid cloud computing environment will evolve without some common object storage layer.

Of course, none of this shift to object storage systems with the local data center is going to occur overnight. But at this point, that shift to object storage both inside and the cloud is all but inevitable.