Storage Field Day 15: The data protection by IBM
Often we think about IBM as the leader of legacy solutions like AIX system, mainframe, and AS400. In fact for this company, keeping this product line has a strategic reason. But during the years, another side of the company is really growing its portfolio with new interesting IT solutions dedicated to on-premise and cloud environments. IBM Cloud, for example, is one of the most important services developed by the innovation team.
Following the same way, another product confirms the willingness to stay aligned with the backup and data protection market. IBM Spectrum Protect, the new came from IBM’s house, is a software solution able to protect physical (AIX included) and virtual workloads. Let’s see in-depth!
The features
At glance, there are 3 key features in this product: high scalability (up to 4 PByte), easy to use and cloud-ready. Let me say, one of the must to have rules to stay in the data protection market segment is represented by the ability to enable and protect on-premises elements using cloud elements such as object storage and more.
Near the use of MongoDB as a catalog system and analytics components to gain visibility and use information came from backup to take actions, the main interaction elements are:
- End-user self-service portal, with RBAC to handle “people”, permissions and operations across the entire platform
- Restful API to interact with 3rd party integrations.
- Recover features that guarantee a restore without interference (database renaming and network remapping)
- Cloud connectors
Keeping this focus on cloud connections, the integration with multiple cloud providers is the welcome feature that realizes agility in terms of consumption to deliver data and systems in cloud infrastructures. In this way is possible to reduce infrastructure costs keeping a pay-as-you-go cost model.
Another key feature that gains a secondary effect on stored data is represented by the “Data Reuse”: the ability to get information from backup stored data. In this way, other than restoring data, it is possible to make test/dev environments, reporting, analytics, patch management,… This opens the door to other non-related backup use cases like governance and regulations.
The test!
Using the live demo has not the same feeling as testing the platform strength, but the guided demo realized by IBM could give an interesting touch on user interface and basic tasks that could be done without any hardware, software and skill-set preparation.
The workflow to bring clients under protection is really easy and after a few steps, I successfully add new clients.
From the architecture perspective, I couldn’t express any judgment, but I hope to have the chance in the future to put my hands on a real case.
If you’re interested to feel the touch with your hands, just check here.
My POV during Storage Field Day
During Storage Field Day, we had the pleasure to meet Steve Kenniston, Business Development Executive, Spectrum Storage Software and Christian Burns, Technical Sales Team Lead, Spectrum Protect Plus.
IBM with Spectrum Protect aims to complete the storage offering. This could be a strategic way to consolidate services and solutions for existing customers that already have bought IBM solutions.
There are some UI features that IMHO should be improved, like backup elements arrangements and the operations to restore data are not so intuitive. Anyway, the product development is following the right direction, and I’m curious to see what will happen!
Disclaimer: I have been invited to Storage Field Day 15 by Gestalt IT who paid for travel, hotel, meals and transportation. I did not receive any compensation for this event and No one obligate me to write any content for this blog or other publications. The contents of these blog posts represent my personal opinions about technologies presented during this event.