Today IBM and Catalogic announced that a new set of solutions that combines Catalogic’s flagship product, ECX, with several of IBM’s products. The new joint solutions are aimed at modernizing IT infrastructure including automation of storage and data management, self-service capabilities, and complete RESTful API management. This modernization should deliver superior results while lowering OPEX. The joint solutions will enable companies to accelerate implementation of new use cases and workloads.
Today IBM and Catalogic announced that a new set of solutions that combines Catalogic’s flagship product, ECX, with several of IBM’s products. The new joint solutions are aimed at modernizing IT infrastructure including automation of storage and data management, self-service capabilities, and complete RESTful API management. This modernization should deliver superior results while lowering OPEX. The joint solutions will enable companies to accelerate implementation of new use cases and workloads.
As we stated previously: ECX manages the full lifecycle of Copy Data. The software is deployed as a virtual appliance allowing IT to leverage the existing storage investment without going to the "rip and replace" method of expanding storage. And ECX has several use cases including: leverage copy data by orchestrating and automating consistent SnapMirrors to automated disaster recovery, Test Dev, and analytics; next generation data protection through instant recovery and disaster recovery by leveraging snapshot data; hybrid cloud “killer app” that uses orchestration to leverage liquid compute resources in the cloud, and copy data analytics with advanced search, report and analyze. ECX has been validated with several of the enterprise and mid-range storage offerings within the IBM portfolio after several months of testing.
Cloud computing is changing the face of IT and organizations need new ways to help them adapt with this change. IT infrastructure needs to be more agile, flexible and responsive without losing its core reliability and security. Catalogic states that its new joint solutions with IBM can allow IT to achieve infrastructure responsiveness and agility without disruption, by integrating into the storage infrastructure that they already have. While these new solutions will have a range of use cases the two most notable with be the Hybrid Cloud and DevOps.
According to Catalogic, these joint solutions will enable customers to leverage the public could in an efficient manner that in turn will allow them to simplify their operations and save costs. With ECX, IT can automate creating live application environments in the cloud that can support key IT functions. With the lower costs of using the cloud Catalogic claims users can see ROIs of 300+% when leveraging the cloud for certain use cases. ECX will also help DevOps by giving the IT team a management layer that delivers automation and self-service capabilities, along with full RESTful API management that the development team can access. This will enable “infrastructure as code” for the development team.
New solutions include:
- ECX with Storwize and SAN Volume Controller: Advanced Data Management for Core Data Center Infrastructure Operations – IBM’s Storwize family of hybrid flash/HDD systems serve as the primary storage platform for core data center operations across a wide range of environments. Similarly, IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is commonly used for core application environments. Combining ECX with one or several of these systems delivers advanced data management capabilities to the production computing environment, and allows the IT team to improve core services including automated DR, enhanced test & development, business analytics, rapid data recovery, and more.
- ECX with IBM FlashSystem V9000 – IBM’s FlashSystem V9000 is the market’s leading all flash storage array, based upon its combination of scalability, performance, and overall economics. Given that V9000 often serves as the primary production array for Tier 1 mission critical applications, adding ECX delivers crucial capabilities for those looking to improve upon their local data recovery and remote disaster recovery operations. With ECX, data recovery capabilities can be validated daily, using ECX’s ability to automate the instantiation of a full application environment that leverages the V9000’s native capability to deliver rapid application consistent snapshots and data replicas. The V9000 with ECX is also an ideal solution in DevOps operations, given the solution’s ability to provision environments rapidly, with significant automation and self-service capabilities for the development teams that can be easily invoked via other DevOps tools, leveraging ECX’s REST APIs.
- ECX for Hybrid Cloud Operations with IBM SoftLayer -IBM’s SoftLayer is the public cloud of choice for enterprise clients, given its wide range of options for infrastructure as a service and it’s positioning as a natural extension of a client’s core data center operations. ECX serves as an accelerator for a customer’s ability to take advantage of the elastic compute infrastructure that SoftLayer provides. Hybrid Cloud operations begin with data movement—a key success factor is the ability to move data to and from the cloud environment in a predictable way, guided by policies for scheduling and automation, all of which ECX makes easy. More importantly, data in the cloud is intended to be used to achieve a business outcome. ECX adds tremendous value in allowing the client to define automated data usage policies which orchestrate all layers of the stack required to instantiate a fully functional, application consistent working environment, thereby radically reducing the operating costs of creating and maintaining application environments within the cloud
- ECX with IBM Spectrum Protect (Flash Copy Manager) – IBM’s Spectrum Protect is a software offering that leverages the native snapshots of IBM storage to provide data protection with rapid data recovery. ECX integrated with Spectrum Protect allows the client to catalog and leverage existing snapshots for critical use cases beyond data protection including disaster recovery, development and test, and business analytics.
IBM and Catalogic will be holding a live event on February 2nd at 11 AM EST to demonstrate these solutions and further go into details around use cases. The event is open to the public and users can register below.
Availability
IBM and Catalogic’s joint solutions are available today.
IBM and Catalogic joint products.
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