Software Defined Storage for Multi-Cloud - walking the path.

I attended today a great series of discussions and presentation during the User Group led by Barry Whyte and Abilio Oliveira about the recent IBM announcements in Wellington, NZ.

Among them, the re-design of storage pools in Spectrum Virtualize (and therefore in all the “V series”, from All Flash V9000 to Hybrid V7000) and the release of Spectrum NAS stood out to me as technologies truly walking the path of Software Defined Storage, beyond the marketing terms.

Spectrum Virtualize was introduced in 2003 as a block storage virtualization appliance, with a very specific problem in mind : allowing clients to seamlessly exploit multiple monolithic arrays as one pool of storage – including data movement and advanced storage functions. Fast forward 15 years later, Spectrum Virtualise is one of the 2 pillars of IBM’s Block Software Defined Storage and Modular Arrays offering. The longevity - and growth - of this technology is quite unique. And is in great part due to its unique code stack.

The “SVC code stack” was designed in the first place to be modular and to allow flexible “software” changes, independently from the hardware platform. New software features can be added without rebuilding the entire stack, in isolation of each other, including the underlying hardware. Software Defined before its time !

The introduction of Data Reduction Pools is yet another example of Spectrum Virtualize transforming itself to meet the demand of the market and follow the technological evolutions of hardware. The design of storage pools in Spectrum Virtualise had largely remained unchanged since 2003. In 2012, IBM introduced compression. And at time the All Flash data center still seemed far away and hybrid arrays were ruling. So naturally IBM optimized the code for such environments. From destaging techniques to internal block sizes, it was all about utilizing those spinning drives optimally.

Data Reduction Pools are literally designed from the ground up to accommodate All Flash Storage. From a new “Compression 2.0” engine to deduplication to UNMAP, it takes into account all the characteristics of a Flash backend to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and efficiency.

The best part of it ? It runs on the same hardware, does not require more licenses and is a code upgrade away. What’s next ? One thing is for sure, the market is never short of innovation. Next stop: end-to-end NVMe. A space to watch…

Spectrum NAS is the latest addition to the Spectrum Storage Software Family. Anyone can now simply spin up their own Enterprise Filer on their own x86 servers in minutes -at scale and with ease. Given that we were in New Zealand, resiliency and high availability were a hot topic. Spectrum NAS leverages both Erasure Coding for efficient data integrity protection, and replication for disaster recovery.

Spectrum Scale (IBM’s other Scale Out Filesystem technology) has proven its value in large scale, performance-oriented deployments. But sometimes it does feel like driving a Formula One in central Paris (those who would have driven through “Place de L’Etoile” at 9AM on a Monday will know the feeling). At the end both have a place when architecting solutions.

In many aspects, Spectrum NAS resembles Spectrum Accelerate – for Enterprise unstructured data. Its n-way architecture is designed with hardware failure in mind. It delivers the modern enterprise filer features expected nowadays. Finally it is extremely easy to deploy and manage. And because it is “Software Defined”, it runs on your traditional x86 rich server, alongside your off-premises cloud platform (for DR for instance). And it is can be driven through APIs.

Just like Spectrum Virtualize, because it is software defined, it can leverage the latest hardware evolutions (NVMe, X-point) – now and tomorrow. Spectrum Virtualize and Spectrum NAS are two examples of Software Defined Technologies that have a proven track-record of delivering the benefits of SDS. Along with the rest of the Spectrum Storage portfolio, they are the foundation for building an infrastructure that spans and connect the multiple clouds (on and off-premises) - today.

I invite you to join Barry Whyte next week in Las Vegas at THINK to get into more details. Or join us in Sydney for the Technical University in August 2018 !