Finding space for rapidly growing data volumes is a critical concern for enterprises today—but it’s not the only data concern. Companies in a recent study ranked “improve backup/disaster recovery” and “reduce costs” as their top storage needs. And in the same survey, more than 75 percent said that to achieve these goals, they plan to increase spending on cloud services. How the organization stores, manages and protects data, in other words, can be as important as how much capacity the organization provides for data.
To meet their functionality and capacity needs, an increasing number of enterprises are turning to software-defined storage. However, the use of software-defined—or “virtualized”—storage is still not as widespread as virtualized servers. That’s because many users are not aware of the benefits that software-defined storage can provide, including efficient operations, cost savings and improved security—as well as cloud-based backup and disaster recovery.
IBM Spectrum Virtualize provides an ideal way to manage and protect the huge volumes of data organizations use for big-data analytics and new cognitive workloads. It is a proven offering that has been available for years in IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), the IBM Storwize family of storage solutions, IBM FlashSystem V9000 and VersaStack—with more than 150,000 systems running IBM Spectrum Virtualize. These systems are delivering better than five nines of availability while managing more than 7.2 exabytes of data.
