If money is only as safe as where it is kept, then data follows the same axiom.

As data becomes increasingly more valuable to businesses, where it is stored has risen in importance as well. For storage clients of IBM Corp., that means reliance on the company to protect as well as preserve in a landscape that is constantly under attack.

“Most of our clients, whether it be big, medium or small, realize that data is their most valuable asset,” said Eric Herzog (pictured), chief marketing officer and vice president of global channels at IBM Storage. “With data as their most valuable asset, what that means is storage is the critical foundation. If storage makes a mistake, that data is gone. If you have a malware or ransomware attack, storage can help you recover.”

Herzog spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how IBM storage technology helps protect customers from attack, increased activity in the container market, and future plans for the company’s flash systems portfolio. (* Disclosure below.)

Storage detects threats

IBM’s approach is to build-in cyber resilience for its portfolio of storage products. One of these is Spectrum Protect, a data protection platform that provides businesses with a single point of control for backup and recovery.

“If you don’t have cyber resiliency on the storage side, you are leaving yourself exposed,” Herzog said. “We’ve got technology in our Spectrum product that can detect anomalous activity and help the backup or storage administrators realize they are having a ransomware or malware attack.”

In addition to cyber resilience, IBM’s storage operation is also focused on containers. In October, the company made a series of announcements to help customers build solutions that can scale with artificial-intelligence applications and containerized deployments.

These included the IBM Elastic Storage System 3000, which combined the company’s FlashSystem array and the Spectrum Scale file solution into a single integrated appliance.

“We have customers talking about doing 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 containers,” Herzog said. “This is the year that containers start to go really big time.”

IBM also has plans to extend its presence in the flash storage market, with a follow up to the FlashSystem 9100 solution announced in 2018, according to Herzog.

“That delivered, in a four-node cluster, up to 15 million input/output operations per second with under 100 microseconds of latency by creating our own custom flash,” Herzog said. “Watch for some of the things we’re going to be announcing in the first half of 2020 around our flash core modules and our flash system technologies.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE