When we speak with our customers about their storage concerns, we find that cybersecurity, cost and hybrid cloud deployment are often at the top of their minds. Today, we are announcing new cyber resilience capabilities and a flexible consumption model to address these needs.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Improve cyber resilience with Safeguarded Copy for IBM FlashSystem
• Increase storage flexibility with IBM Storage as a Service
• Deliver better performance and availability with new mainframe storage models

Improve cyber resilience with Safeguarded Copy for IBM FlashSystem

Cybercrime continues to be a major concern for business. According to one estimate, it’s likely a company will be the target of a cyberattack every 11 seconds and the total cost of these attacks could exceed USD 6 trillion in 2021 alone[1]. Almost every day we see reports of new attacks.

Traditional approaches to data protection work well for their intended purposes but aren’t adequate to protect against cyberattacks, which may encrypt or otherwise corrupt your data. Remote replication for disaster recovery will replicate all changes — malicious or not — to the remote copy. And data stored on offline media or the cloud may take too long to recover from a widespread attack. Recovery has taken some businesses days or weeks of downtime.

What’s needed is a solution that combines the protection of offline copies with the speed of local copies.

What IBM offers

The new Safeguarded Copy function for IBM FlashSystem® and IBM SAN Volume Controller is designed to help businesses recover quickly and safely from a cyberattack, helping reduce recovery to minutes or hours².

Safeguarded Copy automatically creates efficient immutable snapshots according to a schedule. These snapshots are stored specially by the system and cannot be connected to servers, creating a logical “air gap” from malware or other threats. They also cannot be changed and cannot be deleted except according to a pre-planned schedule, which helps protect against errors or actions of unhappy staff.

In the event of an attack, our orchestration software IBM Copy Services Manager helps you identify the best Safeguarded backup to use and automates the process to restore data to online volumes. Because a restore action uses the same snapshot technology, it is almost instantaneous — much faster than using offline copies or copies stored in the cloud.

With storage virtualization in FlashSystem and IBM SAN Volume Controller you can extend the benefits of Safeguarded Copy to over 500 different storage systems from IBM and all major vendors.

“Keeping our data secure and available is paramount,” says Alexander Würflinger, CIO, Archdiocese Salzburg. “As an IBM FlashSystem user, we are eager to deploy Safeguarded Copy to ensure we always have a fully protected and tamper-proof data copy if needed to quickly recover from any form of attack.”

Next steps

• To assess your current state of data protection and security, take the IBM cyber resiliency assessment. This assessment is free and provides an easy way to measure gaps, strengths and weaknesses against National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cyber Security Framework best practices. The result is a customized cyber resilience strategy including blind spots, recommended areas for improvement and ways to better use existing solutions.
• To speak with our storage experts, fill out this form or call sales at +1 877-426-4264 (Priority code: Storage).

Increase storage flexibility with IBM Storage as a Service

As businesses increasingly deploy storage in a hybrid cloud model, there’s been growing demand for more flexible storage options. Consumers want to deploy cloud storage as and when they need it without having to plan or complete procurement cycles. They don’t want to worry about maintaining storage and instead prefer to have the entire lifecycle managed for them, and they want a similar approach for their data that isn’t stored in public cloud.

Demand is so great that International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that by 2024, more than half of data center infrastructure will be consumed and operated using this as-a-service model3.

What IBM offers

IBM Storage as a Service, part of IBM’s flexible infrastructure initiative, extends your hybrid cloud experience with a new flexible consumption model enabled for both your on-premises and hybrid cloud infrastructure needs.

Getting started is easy. Pick the storage performance tier you need, an initial capacity and a length of commitment. Then IBM delivers the IBM FlashSystem storage that meets your needs with 50% extra capacity to allow for plenty of growth. Anytime you need to use storage, you can deploy in under 10 minutes from installed capacity. And as you use storage, IBM automatically delivers more once you’ve used 75% of the installed capacity.

Plus, you pay for only what you use. Billing is based on physical capacity, so you get all the benefits of data reduction and there’s no penalty for growth above the base commitment or for data that doesn’t compress well. It’s designed for OPEX financial treatment⁴.

IBM Storage as a Service comes with all the rich functional capabilities of IBM FlashSystem — including the new Safeguarded Copy function and our optional 100% availability guarantee⁵ — and is ready for hybrid cloud deployments. IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud provides a consistent storage experience whether on premises or in the cloud, and customers can leverage Equinix cloud-adjacent colocation services.

“In our business, data generation is a constant and maintaining its integrity an imperative,” said Dave Anderson-Ward at Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency. “We’re always looking for the most efficient ways to securely store and manage these growing volumes. The new IBM Storage as a Service solution is something to consider because it would give us the benefit of maintaining our data on premises, while paying for capacity, as we use it. In addition, with IBM maintaining the system, we can focus on the data.”

Customers also receive concierge service from an IBM Technical Account Manager. They help you get started, monitor your environment and advise on best practices you should adopt. They also help coordinate IBM resources to speed resolution if you need to open a ticket.

IBM Storage as a Service is an easy, flexible way to get IBM FlashSystem storage with the benefits of subscription pricing and complete lifecycle support from IBM⁶.

Next steps

• Not sure you’re a fit for an as-a-service model? Take our IBM IT consumption assessment to evaluate whether your organization is an ideal candidate to adopt and benefit from a flexible consumption model for storage.
• To speak with our storage experts, fill out this form or call sales at +1 877-426-4264 (Priority code: Storage).

Deliver better performance and availability with new mainframe storage models

According to the CIO Tech Poll: Tech Priorities, 2021 research, 46% of IT leaders are planning to increase spending in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning over the next 12 months⁷.

Remember: AI and big data projects have immensely high data-usage requirements for storage. To support investments in these technologies, businesses will need the right storage infrastructure.

What IBM offers

IBM is announcing a new generation of Storage for IBM Z Systems designed to deliver better performance and availability. That improved performance provides headroom for new AI and machine learning workloads.

First, IBM DS8980F delivers ten times better availability: now “seven nines” or an average of only 3 seconds downtime per year. The system also has more than double maximum cache and provides 2x greater bandwidth capacity with 32 Gb/s fibre channel host adapters. Together these enhancements result in a 25% response time reduction for a mainframe database-like workload, which helps you add functions such as AI to extract more value from your data on IBM Z⁸.

The new IBM TS7770 features a flash cache that delivers the same performance in only one drawer as ten drawers of disk drives, enabling you to reduce rack space needs. The new TS7770, DS8910F, and networking can now all be combined into a single rack, which reduces floorspace by 50% compared with the systems separately.

Next steps

• To speak with our storage experts, fill out this form or call sales at +1 877-426-4264 (Priority code: Storage).