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IBM has made a couple of major cloudy launches, announcing what is claimed as the industry’s first object storage service for hybrid clouds, as well as elaborating on the partnership with VMware announced earlier this year.
IBM Cloud Object Storage is based primarily around the technology of Cleversafe, which was acquired by the Armonk giant in November last year, but also around SecureSlice, which combines ‘erasure coding’ – whereby data is broken into fragments and stored across a set of different locations – with encryption and decryption.
Alongside security, IBM is also touting the availability and economic benefits of its new storage, saying it can tolerate ‘even catastrophic regional outages’ with continuous availability inherent in its architecture. The company argues that, on internal testing comparing IBM Cloud Object Storage Vault Cross-Region Services to a ‘leading vendor’, it was 24% less expensive when managing half a petabyte of data.
“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, IBM Cloud senior vice president in a statement. “With today’s announcement, IBM becomes the leading cloud vendor to provide clients the flexibility and availability of object data storage across on-premises and public clouds.”
As is often the way, IBM has unveiled a brand spanking new customer with its launch, and in this case it is link management platform Bitly, which is using the cloud object storage to analyse the more than 10 billion clicks it processes each month globally. “We turned exclusively to IBM Cloud because of its leadership in data services,” said Robert Platzer, Bitly CTO. “Through this partnership IBM will help us transform our business and build a variety of new cloud services – from advanced analytics and data mining to data research – into our software platform.”
Regarding VMware, IBM has pushed out a number of stats: 1,000 joint customers are now moving their VMware environments to the IBM Cloud, as well as mobilising and training 4,000 global service consultants to help VMware customers access and leverage IBM’s cloud. The news of customers involved in this partnership, including Marriott International and Monitise, were referenced at the recent VMworld event in August.