UPDATED 03:33 EDT / JULY 15 2014

IBM adds Elastic Storage to its SoftLayer cloud infrastructure

small__5068482201IBM is revamping the way it does cloud storage. Having already committed some $1.2 billion to establish data centers for rent in every country where it needs them, Big Blue is now offering a new hardware/software/storage capability for cloud and hybrid users that it says can lead to 90 percent savings.

Key to all of this is IBM’s new software-defined storage-as-a-service, called Elastic Storage on Cloud. This is a new capability offered by SoftLayer, the company IBM acquired last year, and whose tech is now the foundation of its cloud efforts. The new capability is said to be an outgrowth of Watson’s data management system, which famously kicked humankind’s butt on the TV game show Jeopardy.

Elastic Storage is basically a rebranded GPFS, and the service offers the following:

  • SoftLayer bare metal resources
  • High performance data management
  • InfiniBand link to and between clustered servers
  • Movement of data between customer’s on-premises infrastructure and the cloud.

Customers can take advantage of Direct Link connections between IBM’s points of presence and SoftLayer’s data centers to create private, dedicated connections. It’s likely that the availability of these will spread as IBM sets up more SoftLayer data centers acrosss the world, though the Ford Transit van access method (FTVAL) will probably be faster and less expensive when it comes to loading up very large data sets.

IBM says Elastic Storage on Cloud has been optimized for analytics workloads and technical computing tasks, for example credit risk management, financial analysis, genomics, scientific research and seismic data processing. It adds that customers can “deploy their applications on fully supported ready-to-run clusters complete with Elastic Storage, IBM Platform LSF or Platform Symphony workload management software and SoftLayer’s bare-metal infrastructure.”

Despite IBM’s claims of cost savings, a quick glance at the prices makes your eyes water. The service starts at a whopping $13,735 per 100TB per month. Compare this to SoftLayer object storage prices which begin at $0.04/GB/month – or $4,096 for 100TB a month according to our rusty maths. Nevertheless, the extra 9k or so gets you full support, software licenses and access to SoftLayer infrastructure.

photo credit: Elif Ayiter/Alpha Auer/…./ via photopin cc

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU