IBM Redefines Security, Availability and Economics of Storing Data in the Hybrid CloudIBM

Press Release: IBM recently introduced a new cloud object storage service that redefines the security, availability and economics of storing, managing and accessing massive amounts of digital information across hybrid clouds. The company’s breakthrough new IBM Cloud Object Storage offering derives from IBM's acquisition of Cleversafe and its significant portfolio of patents which are designed to deliver clients better value with industry-leading security.

Though organizations are flocking to the cloud for improved efficiencies and IT agility, clients see a gap in their ability to store increasingly larger volumes of data – on premises and off premises. Presently companies have to choose between storing data on internal servers and storage systems, or in the cloud. It’s a dilemma that has hindered business flexibility and raised infrastructure costs. As data volumes continue to grow across industries, the need to create flexible hybrid cloud storage solutions has intensified.

The new IBM Cloud Object Storage storage-as-a-service offerings will enable clients for the first time to scale large unstructured data volumes across on-premises systems as well as public and private clouds quickly and easily. This will dramatically increase IT system flexibility and security. In a price comparison of identical object storage capacity running on a competitive cloud, the new IBM Cloud Object Storage demonstrated more than 25% lower costs for the capacity, environment and locations compared. Built on an innovation called SecureSlice from industry leader, Cleversafe, (acquired by IBM in 2015), IBM Cloud Object Storage is designed to make storing and managing that data on the IBM Cloud reliable and available across regions and around the clock.

“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, Senior Vice President, IBM Cloud. “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.”

Bitly Migrates 1 Billion Datasets to IBM Cloud Object Storage; Adopts IBM as its Exclusive Cloud Platform

Bitly, the world’s leading customer experience platform, is continually looking for new ways to help organizations use its software platform to gain actionable insights about their customers. The company has adopted the new IBM Cloud Object Storage service to more quickly and easily analyze historical data that is being produced by the more than 10 billion clicks it processes each month across the world. This historical data, up to 500TB, includes user interactions across online channels – useful information for marketers that are using Bitly to deliver and measure their efforts across all marketing channels.

“With more than 400 million new links created every month, the Bitly platform is growing at an explosive rate,” said Robert Platzer, CTO, Bitly. “We turned exclusively to IBM Cloud because of its leadership in data services. 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. The new IBM Cloud Object Storage service will enable us to manage all the data from our on-premises and cloud infrastructure with ease and flexibility.”

Bitly’s adoption of IBM Cloud Object Storage is part of a deep multi-year partnership with IBM. With today’s announcement, IBM Cloud has become the exclusive cloud platform for Bitly. Earlier this year, the company moved 25 billion data-infused links to IBM Cloud to take advantage of the high performance and global scale of IBM’s nearly 50 global Cloud Data Centers. With that migration complete, the company has turned its attention to managing all 1 billion datasets of the historical interactions behind those links with IBM Cloud Object Storage.

IBM Breaks the Constraints of Today’s Storage Architecture

At the heart of the new IBM Cloud Object Storage service is IBM’s innovative SecureSlice, which combines encryption and erasure coding for greater security and information dispersal which enhances data availability. These fundamental technologies can help clients satisfy their data compliance security requirements and maintain access to critical data even in the face of a regional outage. These capabilities are also delivered without having to make expensive copies of data, resulting in improved economics to clients. Specifically:

Security

IBM is the only company to have combined erasure coding with encryption and decryption. When data comes into the IBM Cloud Object Storage system, SecureSlice automatically encrypts each segment of data before it is erasure coded and dispersed. The content can only be re-assembled through IBM Cloud’s “Accesser” technology at the client’s primary data center, where the data was originally received, and decrypted by SecureSlice.

Availability

Because of these innovations, IBM Cloud Object Storage can tolerate even catastrophic regional outages without interruption of access to data or the need for customer intervention. Continuous availability is inherent in the architecture. Some traditional cloud storage providers, place the burden of data management and the cost for creating and maintaining a second copy for regional fault tolerance on the client.

Economics

As a result of the technology’s robust hybrid capabilities, IBM Cloud Object Storage has demonstrated it can, for the compared capacity, environment and locations, reduce certain overall costs of cloud storage. For example, based on internal IBM testing comparing IBM Cloud Object Storage Vault Cross-Region Services to a leading vendor in head-to-head Cross Region service managing ½ petabyte (PB) of data, the IBM solution was close to 24% less expensive for the location and workload compared, and at 5PB the service was more than 25% less expensive.

Delivering the Flexibility Clients Need to Meet Business Requirements

IBM Cloud Object Storage is offered in two public, multi-tenant services: Cross Region Service, which sends the sliced data to at least three geographically dispersed regions across IBM Cloud data centers; and Regional Service, which holds the data in multiple data centers in a given region. Both the Regional and Cross Region services provide SecureSlice, encrypted erasure coding to protect the data. The new services complement the company’s existing IBM Cloud Object Storage System for on premises object storage, and the IBM Cloud Object Storage Dedicated Service, a private cloud offering that runs on bare-metal servers. All of the IBM Cloud Object Storage services on or off-premises support Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift interfaces for greater programming flexibility.


IBM Brings Cloud Object Storage to hundreds of Storage Platforms with Transparent Cloud Tiering

Finally, for the first time, IT organizations with on-premises storage will be able to move data seamlessly to and from the cloud. IBM Spectrum Virtualize will add hybrid cloud capabilities to nearly 400 platforms, both IBM and non-IBM. IBM Spectrum Virtualize, IBM Spectrum Protect and IBM Spectrum Scale, use Transparent Cloud Tiering to extend traditional storage to the cloud with policy driven, automated simplicity, security and control.

IBM Cloud Object Storage is available now for enterprise clients across IBM Cloud data centers in the US and Europe and will be available in the Asia Pacific region in December. Availability via digital channels, with swipe-and-go credit card support, will begin in the US starting in December and Europe soon thereafter.