IBM has unveiled several new storage-related products at this year’s InterConnect conference, including the company’s new cloud storage service, IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex (Flex), and the powerful IBM Cloud Object Storage Cold Vault (Cold Vault) service. Also announced is an expanded partnership with NetApp and a new agreement with Veritas.
IBM has unveiled several new storage-related products at this year’s InterConnect conference, including the company’s new cloud storage service, IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex (Flex), and the powerful IBM Cloud Object Storage Cold Vault (Cold Vault) service. Also announced is an expanded partnership with NetApp and a new agreement with Veritas.
The IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex service leverages a new “pay as you use” model of storage tiers, indicating that this pricing model will lower the cost to store and access data by over 50 percent compared to other services such as AWS S3. This new, simplified pricing is especially attractive for clients whose data usage patterns are sporadic, as Flex users can benefit from the cost savings of cold storage for rarely accessed data all the while maintaining high accessibility to all their data. Flex is the result of the acquisition and integration of Cleversafe.
The company’s new IBM Cloud Object Storage Cold Vault (Cold Vault) service allows their clients to access cold storage data on the IBM Cloud much quicker than before, indicating “in hundreds of milliseconds instead of minutes.” Cold Vault also has cost-effective pricing, as low as 1.1 cents/month.
IBM’s expanded partnership with NetApp connects their cloud storage solution with IBM Cloud. In this new agreement, NetApp’s AltaVault cloud backup solutions will now be able to automatically send backups to IBM Cloud Object Storage on IBM Cloud. Moreover, integrating native support for IBM Cloud Object Storage into AltaVault solutions allows NetApp users to deploy backup data to the IBM Cloud. As a result, IBM indicates that this will help to reduce unnecessary data center expansion and will give AltaVault users the ability leverage the flexibility, security and regional fault tolerance of IBM Cloud Object Storage.
The agreement with Veritas will help enterprises working with increasing data volumes to better manage, optimize, and protect their data across hybrid cloud environments. IBM has certified its Cloud Object Storage with NetBackup 8.0 and certified NetBackup 8.0 to run on the IBM Cloud. Not only can customers more easily migrate data to the cloud, they can better protect it once it is migrated there.
Availability
Cold Vault is available now in IBM Bluemix. Flex is expected to be available in the second quarter of this year.
IBM Cloud Object Storage services
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