IBM Corp. today announced container-native software-defined storage and, by association, its entry into the hyperconverged infrastructure market with an appliance of its own making.

The company is also revamping its model ESS 5000 subsystem with 10% greater storage capacity and introducing a new ESS 3200 array that has double the read performance of its predecessor.

IBM Spectrum Fusion, which will ship in the second half of 2021 combines IBM’s general parallel file system technology and its data protection software to simplify data access across data center, edge and hybrid cloud environments. Software containers, which are self-contained operating units that include an application and its dependencies, were not originally designed to support persistent storage. But as their popularity has expanded vendors have found ways to work around that early limitation and open up more use cases.

“By having a fully containerized piece of software you have tighter integration so you can do things fully natively such as disaster recovery and snapshots,” said Eric Herzog (pictured), chief marketing officer and vice president of global storage channels at IBM. Containerized SDS also offers better storage visibility across a variety of centralized and edge scenarios, he said.

Spectrum Fusion provides a single global namespace that can span edge, core and cloud infrastructure. That means organizations can manage only a single copy of data with no requirements to make copies when moving workloads to other infrastructure. That strengthens data compliance and reduces security risks created by duplication.

Users can access files wherever they’re located with caching used to enhance performance. They can also access data in network file systems such as from Dell EMC’s Isilon and those made by Netapp Inc. Access to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3, IBM cloud object storage and older IBM Spectrum products is also supported and the software is engineered to integrate with IBM Cloud Satellite, a managed cloud that runs within customers’ data centers.

Storage appliance

The first incarnation of Spectrum Fusion will come as a container-native hyperconverged infrastructure system that integrates x86 or IBM Power microprocessors, two flash storage modules and 100-gigabit Ethernet networking in a single 1u rack running OpenShift.

IBM currently sells HCI systems under license from Nutanix Inc., meaning this will be the company’s first foray into the market with its own software. “What’s different is that we’re fully containerized whereas most [HCI vendors] lead with virtualization,” Herzog said. “We are leading with a container layer, and we will support virtualization as well.”

Pricing on the appliance, which likely will ship by the end of the third quarter, hasn’t been determined, Herzog said. IBM plans to release a software-only version of Spectrum Fusion in early 2022.

The IBM ESS 3200 is a 2U storage array with a throughput of 80 gigabytes per second per node, which is about double the performance of its ESS 3000 predecessor. The 3200 supports up to 8 InfiniBand HDR-200 or Ethernet-100 ports and up to 367 terabytes of storage capacity per node. All ESS systems also now come equipped with containerized deployment capabilities automated with the latest version of Red Hat Ansible.

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