The IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) System is a breakthrough cloud platform that helps solve petabyte and beyond storage challenges for companies worldwide. Enterprises that need to store large volumes of unstructured data must look beyond their current storage solutions and evaluate new approaches. IBM Cloud Object Storage provides organizations the flexibility, scale and simplicity required to store, manage and access today’s rapidly growing unstructured data in a hybrid cloud environment.
Scalability
IBM COS software has been tried and tested at web-scale with production deployments exceeding up to 100 PBs of capacity at multiple customers, and the ability to scale to Exabytes (EB) while maintaining reliability, availability, manageability, and remaining more cost-effective. Whether your current needs are less than a Petabyte (PB), 10 PBs, or hundreds of PBs, the IBM COS solution can help meet that requirement due to the scalability capabilities.
Security
From built-in encryption of data at rest and in motion to a range of authentication and access control options, the IBM COS solution includes a wide range of capabilities designed to help you meet your security requirements. These security capabilities have been implemented to help enable better security without compromising scalability, availability, ease of management, or economic efficiency.
Reliability and Availability
In an IBM COS System, the reliability and availability characteristics of the system are configurable. For extremely demanding applications, reliability of 16 nines and availability of 8 nines can be provided. More commonly, customers can configure for more typical levels of reliability and availability and potentially achieve economic savings as a result. The configuration of the IBM COS System allows you to choose the combination of reliability, availability, and economic efficiency that best suits your requirements. Data durability is designed to be maintained over time by built-in integrity checking and self-repair capabilities.
Manageability
The manageability of an IBM COS System helps enable storage administrators to handle up to 15X the storage capacity, freeing time for them to invest in other tasks. The IBM COS System is designed to provide always-on availability and can continue to serve storage applications while completing tasks that would require scheduled downtime in the majority of traditional storage systems. Software upgrades, hardware maintenance, storage capacity expansion, hardware refresh and physical relocation of the storage system are all supported with virtually zero downtime.
Flexibility
IBM COS’s software defined storage solution requires no IBM specific or proprietary hardware. Using IBM COS software with industry standard hardware systems helps enable an IT organization to potentially achieve a significantly lower cost per usable terabyte curve helping the organization to economically manage rapidly increasing storage capacity requirements.
Highlights
• Scalability that offers a single storage system and namespace versus an ever-increasing number of limited-
capacity storage silos
• Security features include a wide range of capabilities designed to help meet security requirements
• Reliability and availability characteristics of the system are configurable to best suit the customer’s requirements
• Manageability that helps enable storage administrators to handle large storage capacity
• Flexibility of a defined storage solution that does not require specific or proprietary hardware
Economics/TCO
IBM COS systems can achieve TCO savings of up to 80 percent compared to most traditional storage systems as well as public cloud storage. TCO savings reflect not only reduced acquisition cost, but saving on power, cooling, and space due to the smaller hardware footprint, as well as lower manpower costs in storage management and operations.
Background
By taking the methods that the Internet used for data networking and applying them to data storage, dispersed storage is designed to allow companies to store massive amounts of content (video, audio, photo, text) securely and reliably.
Summary
Organizations need content storage that can be distributed across their infrastructure to effectively store and distribute content. IBM COS provides a high-availability environment, long-term file integrity and access, and authentication enforcement. Whether organizations have less active, fixed, or frequently accessed content that users are collaborating on, IBM COS offers a security-rich, reliable and cost-effective approach. A shared content storage repository can be accessed in a safeguarded manner by people inside or outside of an organization, enabling collaboration across geographies.
Is IBM COS right for your organization?
Use the following checklist to determine whether your organization could benefit from dispersed storage:
• Do you have applications that require long-term retention of data?
• Does the data consist of large, unstructured objects such as images, movies, and documents?
• Do you have 500 usable terabytes or more of this data?
• Do you have requirements for data security, availability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness?
• Do you have the infrastructure required to support dispersed storage, including:
– Network connectivity?
– High-quality bandwidth (if geo-dispersed)?
For more information on IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS), please contact:
Darren Mills, Director of Technology
P: 866-885-3249