One of the discussions that the global pandemic has brought to the table is how businesses should build simple, secure and resilient storage solutions for uncertain times.

To help enterprises put the right network technology in place, IBM has strengthened its longstanding, strategic 22-year partnership with Brocade Communications Systems Inc. to adopt Brocade Gen 7 platform. It harnesses the power of 64 Gb/s switching technology and transforms current storage networks with autonomous SAN capabilities, simplifying management and reducing costs, according to Matt Key (pictured, middle), FlashSystems solutions SME at IBM.

“It’s certainly a case of raising the bar,” Key said. “So, we have to, as a vendor, continue to evolve in terms of performance, in terms of capacity, cost density, escalating simplicity.”

Key; AJ Casamento (pictured, right), solutioneer at Brocade; and Brian Sherman (pictured, left), storage distinguished engineer at IBM, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed the main capabilities of Gen 7 technology, the requirements for business storage solutions during and post-COVID-19, and the trends of the storage industry. (* Disclosure below.)

Avoiding bottleneck in application demand

This new technology has been widely used across a number of industries, including financial services, pharmaceutical and automotive.

“Something on the order of about 96%, 97% of the global 2,000 make use of fibre channel environments in portions of their world … pretty much if the data matters and it’s something that’s critical, whether we talk about payment card information or healthcare environments, data that absolutely has to be retained, has to get there, has to perform,” Casamento said. “Then it’s this combination that we’re bringing together today.”

The concept of a 64 Gb/s environment aims to avoid a bottleneck in the demands of the application. Another key feature is operational simplicity.

“We have to make it easier from the storage side for operations to be able to manage this volume of data that we have coming out, and our due diligence is to be able to serve the data up as fast as we can and as resilient as we can,” Sherman pointed out.

Simplifying the storage environment is a focus for IBM. Historically, IBM and the industry as a whole used to have entry-level, mid-range and high-end-level products, but earlier this year the company decided to integrate them into one product portfolio.

“It becomes, from an overall administration perspective, one software stake, one automation stack, one way to do point-in-time copies, replication, so focusing on how to make that as simple for the operations as we possibly can,” Sherman explained.

Automation helps enable resilience

Following operational simplicity, another essential feature of the storage solution for the future is the resilience factor.

“As we increased the capacity, as we increased essentially the amount of data responsible for each admin, we have to literally log-rhythmically increase the resiliency of these boxes, because we’re going to talk about petabyte-scale systems and hosting them really 10,000 virtual machines in the 2U form factor,” Key explained.

Having resilient networks means having redundancy and access, as well as protection schemes at every single layer of the stack. “So, we’re quite happy to be able to provide that as we leap-frog the industry and go in literally situations that are three times the competitive density that we see out there,” Key added.

Resilience is becoming increasingly important due to the increase in cyberattacks. Cybersecurity Ventures has predicted that, globally, businesses in 2021 will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds, down from every 14 seconds in 2019.

“I try to hammer that home with our clients that you’re used to having your business continuity disaster recovery, [but] this whole cyber resiliency thing is a completely separate practice that we have to set up and think about and go through the same thought process that you did for your DR,” Sherman said.

Gen 7 helps with resilience through the use of automation. The idea is to be able to find out what the “normal” standard of the network is and let the storage platform and application administrators know when things go sideways, because the demand for applications will not decrease, according to Casamento. It also automates corrective action to resolve issues without human intervention.

“Our argument for the autonomy piece of what we’re doing in the fabrics is you can’t wait on the humans. You need to augment it,” Casamento concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage. (* Disclosure: Broadcom Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Broadcom nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE