Exciting news about the future of IBM Storage.

Over the past year, we have been on a journey of making strategic shifts in our IBM Storage software portfolio—embracing open source and addressing the most critical data challenges facing every enterprise today while simplifying our brand and consumption models. 

Earlier this year, we combined the Red Hat Storage software portfolio with IBM Storage to bring together one of the most comprehensive Storage Software portfolios in the industry. We are investing in industry-leading, open-source-based CEPH as the foundation for our software-defined storage platform.

We see the following three things as the most pressing data challenges our customers face: 

• Adopting AI/ML/high-performance computing workloads and contending with hyper-data growth.
• Creating an information and application supply chain that enables those digital assets the freedom to move from edge-to-core-to-cloud(s).
• Protecting the business’ critical and operational workloads from the reputational impacts and data loss associated with data breaches (intentional or accidental).

The number of storage products IBM offers is extensive, serving a very wide range of audiences who have a broad set of needs and use cases. At the same time, we are constantly seeking ways to enhance and simplify their experiences while providing flexible consumption models.

To that end, we’re making a product branding change to ensure our portfolio continues to be easy for our customers to navigate and understand while addressing our customers’ most pressing data challenges.

Simplifying our brand expression: “IBM Spectrum” becomes “IBM Storage”

IBM Storage engaged in a thorough process that involved studying marketing research, collaborating with experts and, most importantly, consulting with our clients. The result was to simplify our offerings by reducing the number of products we promote to a more manageable number with a bias on solution-led conversations that are software-defined, open and consumable as a service. Also, it was important to make it plainly obvious that IBM is very much in the storage business. This led to a decision to drop “Spectrum” in favor of what we do incredibly well: “Storage.”

But a name change wasn’t enough, we also needed to orient the full innovative might of our engineering, product and marketing efforts behind the most pressing data challenges our customers face, including the adoption of AI at enterprise scale, the digital transformation of application and services from edge-to-core-to-cloud(s), and the protection of business’ critical and operational workloads from the reputational impacts and data loss associated with data breaches (intentional or accidental).

This decision drove the framework in Figure 1:

Address AI and hyper-data growth with IBM Storage for Data and AI

IBM Storage for Data and AI is designed to help customers get the most from their application and information supply chain to improve business outcomes. It unlocks the latent value in your data to fast-track innovation and business results—allowing our clients to eliminate their data ingest and aggregation challenges, increase data relevancy and enable faster data analysis at scale.

This solution is based on the following:

• IBM Storage Scale: A scale-out file and object software-defined storage platform designed for AI, ML and high-performance computing workloads.
• IBM Storage Ceph: A unified and open-source software-defined storage platform designed to address the block, file and object needs of general-purpose workloads.
• IBM Storage Scale System (formerly known as the IBM Elastic Storage System): An all-flash and hybrid elastic compute and storage appliance designed to create highly performant clusters for IBM Storage Scale in a sustainable IT architecture.

Connect edge-to-core-to-cloud(s) with IBM Storage for Hybrid Cloud

IBM Storage for Hybrid Cloud is designed to help customers modernize their application stack, build next-generation applications and innovate faster with data orchestration services for Red Hat OpenShift. It empowers you to deploy cloud architectures on-premises and extend them seamlessly to public cloud environments. Our goal is to help our customers to stop maintaining and start innovating by taking control of their hybrid cloud environments—making IT more agile, scalable, secure, efficient and cost-effective for their stateful container environment and portable workloads.

This solution is based on the following:

• IBM Storage Fusion: A software-defined storage platform with flexible deployment options that delivers data orchestration services to efficiently store, protect, manage, govern, mobilize and integrate data and applications hosted in Red Hat OpenShift environments.
• IBM Storage Fusion HCI System: A purpose-built hyper-converged infrastructure that simplifies the design and deployment of Red Hat OpenShift with container-native data orchestration and storage services to enable faster and consistent Kubernetes architecture deployments.

Enjoy resiliency by default, resiliency by design with IBM Storage for Data Resiliency

IBM Storage for Data Resiliency is designed to help customers safeguard data from breaches and threats while reducing costs and downtime with resilient storage offerings. It integrates machine learning and automation with storage technology to detect anomalies and threats, speed recovery and optimize costs.

This solution is based on the following:

• IBM Storage Defender: Reduce the threat exposure window from days to hours and proactively safeguard data and applications with a multi-faceted and scalable data resiliency offering that defends against cyber-vulnerabilities from detection through recovery with air-gapping capabilities that include logical, operational and physical separation from source data sets. Learn more about IBM Storage Defender in the announcement here.

Timing

This new approach began rolling out at the beginning of 2023, culminating into our Data and Innovation Summit today in New York City, NY.

I’m excited to share our updated identity and vision for IBM Storage with you. Our customers are at the heart of our IBM Storage brand, and we want to ensure you have insight into its evolution and why it is so important to reimagine what enterprise-class and software-defined storage should be in today’s market and for today’s modern business.

Learn more about IBM Storage solutions.