As cloud native workloads become more functional and go mainstream as the linchpin of hybrid cloud and edge strategies, protecting data that lives inside containers is becoming crucial for organizations.

Enterprises need high availability, reliability and scalability, and combining these across different environments without adding even more complexity and costs is key, according to Sam Werner (pictured, right), vice president of product management, storage, at IBM.

“Containers promise or provide a lot of the capabilities that you need to be agile,” he said. “What enterprises are discovering … is they’re not bringing the infrastructure teams along with them, and they’re running into challenges that are inhibiting their ability to achieve the agility they want because their storage needs aren’t keeping up.”

Werner and Eric Herzog (pictured, left), chief marketing officer and vice president of global storage channels at IBM Storage Division, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed the increasing use of containers, the problems related to data storage, and how IBM Spectrum Fusion hopes to resolve this. (* Disclosure below.)

New technology integrates several proven solutions

To help enterprises to build an agile infrastructure to support this new container world, IBM recently announced IBM Spectrum Fusion, which is a fully container-native storage technology that integrates a series of proven solutions that have been implemented in companies for many years, according to Herzog.

“That includes a global scalable file system that can span edge, core and cloud seamlessly with a single copy of the data,” Herzog said. “So, no more data silos and no more 12 copies of the data, which, of course, drive up CapEx and OpEx.”

The solution creates a storage foundation that is accompanied by a single global namespace, single accessibility, local caching, file locking and other technologies to ensure that the data is always good. It is also imbued with the High Availability Disaster Recovery feature, a backup and restore technology that has now become fully container native.

“Spectrum Fusion basically takes several elements of IBM’s existing portfolio, has made them container native and brought them together into a single piece of software,” Herzog explained.

The new technology will be available as a software-defined storage solution in early 2022. But before that, next quarter it will reach the market as a hyperconverged appliance, which will include Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Virtualization technology, as well as a single management tool.

Financial services and retail are some of the leading use cases

The container’s native storage architecture consists of three layers, and the first, considered the core of the solution, is the storage foundation. This is the tier that actually lays the data out onto media and makes it available where it is needed, according to Werner.

The second is the storage services layer, which brings capabilities like high availability and disaster recovery, data protection, data governance and data discovery.

“Then, there needs to be connection into the application runtime,” Werner stated. “There has to be application awareness to do things like high availability and application consistent backup and recovery.” This is the number three layer.

The first use cases are industries that are moving to containers faster than others, such as financial services, manufacturing, retail and healthcare, including genomic, biotech and drug companies.

“About AI-based manufacturing platforms, we actually have a couple clients right now,” Herzog said. “We’re doing autonomous driving software … on containers right now, even before Spectrum Fusion with Spectrum Scale.”

From the applications standpoint, those related to AI, analytics and big data are the main apps in Spectrum Fusion, because they tend to spread across the core, edge and cloud.

Although containers are gaining momentum, virtualization and even bare metal continue to be a reality in enterprises IT infrastructure and need to work alongside other technologies, according to Herzog.

“In the global Fortune 2000, 1500, they’re probably going to run all three based on the application’s workload or use cases,” Herzog said. “The good thing at IBM is [that] we can support all three.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE