IBM Enhances Portfolio by Acquiring Object-Based Storage Supplier Cleversafe

Transcription

1 Flash IBM Enhances Portfolio by Acquiring Object-Based Storage Supplier Cleversafe Amita Potnis Richard L. Villars Laura DuBois Ashish Nadkarni IN THIS FLASH This IDC Flash discusses IBM's announcement to acquire Cleversafe, a supplier of object-based storage (OBS) solutions. This acquisition will provide a significant enhancement to IBM's portfolio that is intended to support on-premise and cloud (including hybrid cloud) solutions, as well as extending the range of storage services delivered by IBM SoftLayer. SITUATION OVERVIEW In today's fiercely competitive world, businesses are required to make informed decisions almost instantaneously. It is of utmost importance to adapt to agility in order to meet market demands by introducing new services or products, thereby increasing profits. A core element of most of these new services is the great use of data (structured and unstructured) to enhance the quality of engagement and the quality of business outcomes through deep analytics. Today's digital era has led businesses to adopt newer storage architectures and delivery models, causing disruptions to traditional infrastructure. Recognizing this change in the marketplace, many traditional storage suppliers, including IBM, started a multiyear transition of their technology portfolios to meet the new demand. Earlier in 2015, IBM announced its transition plans by combining the software (previously known as Tivoli and cloud-enabling infrastructure software) and STG business into a combined Systems Division. In addition, IBM also announced its plans to continue to build its Cloud Services Division under the SoftLayer moniker, the namesake service provider it acquired in The SoftLayer service is designed to augment the core capabilities of IBM's software. This transition plan from a company that once focused on selling specialized IT gear and charging enormous maintenance fees to focusing on affordable high-volume storage in on-demand and as-a-service models is a critical step which IBM continues to pursue aggressively. With hybrid cloud model and software-defined storage delivery in mind, IBM recently rebranded its entire storage portfolio under the Spectrum brand. While the Spectrum software-defined storage initiative was bold, and certainly took IBM much closer to realizing the hybrid cloud vision, it lacked a key element object storage. Without such a platform, IBM's storage portfolio was incomplete, and its cloud vision lacked a key "cog" necessary for delivering data persistence for next-generation applications. With that in mind, and heeding calls for moving away from considering GPFS to be an object storage platform, IBM finally took the step of acquiring a real object storage firm Cleversafe. IBM October 2015, IDC #259559

2 plans to integrate Cleversafe as a platform into its cloud business unit, at the same time integrating the product side into the software-defined Spectrum Storage family. Founded in 2004, Cleversafe has been an early entrant and a long-standing provider of object-based storage. The company focuses on developing solutions that have inherent features such as new levels of scalability, security of data, storage efficiency, availability, and reliability, with the option to deploy across geographies or within a single datacenter. With a proven ability to scale to petabytes and beyond, Cleversafe's solutions promise extreme scalability and simplicity, combined with data protection and security, at a significantly lower cost than solutions relying on storing more than one copy of the data to meet reliability requirements. It is worthy of noting that IDC placed Cleversafe in the leaders category two years in a row in IDC's worldwide object-based storage MarketScape. Some of Cleversafe's earliest customers were government agencies that have rigid requirements for defense and security purposes. This experience allowed the company to enter the enterprise market space while also taking on some hyperscale and Web 2.0 firms as its clients. Cleversafe's strengths lie in seeing the need for OBS platforms early on and successfully maneuvering past the company's early challenges to successfully make headway into newer verticals such as media and entertainment, healthcare, and managed service providers. Today IBM SoftLayer offers a range of block, file, and object storage services. IBM SoftLayer's object storage is based on OpenStack SWIFT. OpenStack SWIFT has two components, a standard objectbased API as well as an implementation of a distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store. Both have been used in the SoftLayer Object Storage services. What relationship, if any, the Cleversafe acquisition has to a well-publicized customer escalations is unclear. However, IBM's SoftLayer will benefit from integrating Cleversafe (an OpenStack Foundation member) into the offering for many reasons. Rather than replacing the SWIFT implementation, IBM may intend to augment its Object Storage Services with an enforced consistency option in the form of a Cleversafe object store. Both eventual and enforced or strong consistency models are in use today, and the application varies depending on use case and trade-offs between availability and data being immediately or eventually consistent across replicas and geo-distributed locations. Most important, it gives SoftLayer a hyperscale tested and proven solution that it can use to upgrade and extend its own object store as a service offering. Delivering a robust, secure, and reliable object store is now table stakes competing effectively in today's IaaS and PaaS public cloud markets. Cleversafe is not only compatible with OpenStack Swift but also offers a host of features such as erasure coding, keyless encryption, enhanced security, and several technology partnerships. Owing to its detailed feature set and also the company strategy, IDC positioned Cleversafe as a Leader in its IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2014 Vendor Assessment (IDC #253055, December 2014). Cleversafe's flagship product is its Dispersed Storage Network (dsnet) solution, which slices and disperses data across multiple nodes or geographies using patented Information Dispersal algorithms. The product is offered as either a hardware appliance or a software solution on qualified third-party hardware. The dsnet is made up of three components: dsnet Manager, Accesser, and Slicestor. The dsnet Manager enables operations and maintenance for the object repository, whereas Slicestors are the storage nodes. Accessers provide a REST interface to applications and have the intelligence to encrypt and encode the data on writes and reverse the process on reads. This erasure code based encoding protects the data against drive, server, rack, and site failures by transforming it into a number 2015 IDC #

3 of slices such that the original data can be read using a subset of those slices. This approach is more efficient than data protection schemes that combine RAID and replication. One of Cleversafe's major selling points is the inherent security and reliability of its platform it includes SecureSlice, a keyless encryption technology. This feature allows objects to be encrypted before being sliced and dispersed onto the Slicestor(s). Data can only be accessed when the required threshold of slices have been retrieved. In addition, no one Slicestor has all of the object's slices, thus adding another security layer. To maintain data integrity at scale and over time, a multilevel integrity checking scheme and background data repair process are built into the product. Users can configure fault tolerance levels depending upon the number of sites and number of nodes as well as size of their configuration. Cleversafe has also made several technological partnerships through its Solution Network program. Some of these partnerships include gateway providers such as Panzura, Nasuni, Avere, Riverbed, and CTERA whose products expose CIFS and/or NFS to client applications and technologies such as Symantec NetBackup, CommVault Simpana, and QStar Archive Manager backup and archiving software that enables data protection and long-term retention of objects on Cleversafe's storage solutions. With the acquisition by IBM, Cleversafe is also expected to integrate with IBM's gateway technology, Aspera. This combination will be increasingly critical as IBM's cloud customers are going to demand faster and more scalable onboarding of data into the SoftLayer cloud. Cleversafe's product provides a Swift-compatible API for customer applications, enabling its use as an object storage platform in the OpenStack environment. Cleversafe is also a member of the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data Systems (irods) consortium, providing data management software, as well as the Object Storage Alliance through which the company can foster a community of OBS platform vendors and their ecosystems. Cleversafe uses both direct and indirect sales channels focusing on specific regions and verticals to drive business. Post-acquisition, Cleversafe will be able to leverage IBM's extensive channel and partner ecosystem while keeping its existing relationships with channel partners intact. FUTURE OUTLOOK According to Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Forecast (IDC #251626, October 2014), the object-based storage market is expected to grow to $28.3 billion in While much of this segment is dominated by hyperscale environments such as solutions from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft (Azure), there is enough room for several object-based storage suppliers to play in this space. Many object-based storage software providers find opportunity to expand mindshare and market share via tier 2 service providers to bring to market cloud-based storage services. Examples of such partnerships are Telefónica's implementation of Caringo and Ericsson using Cleversafe for its cloud-based storage services offering. According to 2015 Enterprise Storage Services Survey: Key Findings (IDC #254468, February 2015), businesses intend to use cloud-based services for archiving, data recovery, backup, and collaboration. As the amount of data continues to grow, the need for affordable "pay as you go" cloud-based services will increase substantially, making cloud-based storage services extremely important. Cleversafe technology will enhance IBM's SoftLayer infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and BlueMix (PaaS) offering by providing its customers a more diversified range of complementary cloud deployment models (on-premise and off-premise and dedicated and shared that enable common data control). This move will allow IBM offer greater flexibility, scale, agility, security, and cost optimization IDC #

4 This acquisition will also complement IBM's Spectrum software portfolio that focuses on data protection, backup, and archive as well as IBM's own file and object solution, Spectrum Scale. And Cleversafe offers a strong consistency model, which will be highly complementary to IBM BlueMix customers that are building next-generation applications in the cloud. In this sense, the Cleversafe acquisition is highly strategic to IBM's Cloud, Analytics, Mobility, and Social (CAMS) strategy and will serve as a key infrastructure platform underpinning the company's transformation. In short, the Cleversafe acquisition is not about extending IBM's systems portfolio as much as it is enabling the company's evolution to a cloud service enabler and provider. Related Research Telco Giant Telefónica Deploys Caringo for Cloud Storage (IDC #256226, May 2015) NAB 2015 Showcases a Significant Mindset Shift Towards the Cloud, New Storage Strategies to Cope with Data (IDC #255772, April 2015) Data Storage Innovation Conference Highlights (IDC #255624, April 2015) Archival Strategies in Media and Entertainment: A Special Study (IDC #254651, April 2015) IDC's Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Taxonomy, 2015 (IDC #254078, February 2015) Content Delivery Strategies in Media and Entertainment: A Special Study (IDC #253923, December 2014) Postproduction Storage Strategies in Media and Entertainment: A Special Study (IDC #253275, December 2014) NetApp Exemplifying Commercial Success with OpenStack (IDC #253105, December 2014) Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Forecast (IDC #251626, October 2014) Leading European Broadcaster Deploys MatrixStore from Object Matrix as Nearline Storage for Postproduction Video Content (IDC #249808, August 2014) 2015 IDC #

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