IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) launched new offerings this week for enterprise cloud storage environments.
IBM today unveiled new cloud storage and archiving solutions, while Symantec earlier this week took the wraps off a new clustered file system for cloud environments.
The announcements follow other recent moves by the likes of HP (NYSE: HPQ), EMC (NYSE: EMC) and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), as data storage vendors position for a new world of virtual data center environments and converged networks.
IBM Smart Business Storage uses Big Blue’s General Parallel File System (GPFS), XIV storage systems and BladeCenter servers to create a clustered environment “to provide performance and scalability into multiple petabytes for billions of files, all under one globally addressable namespace,” the company said in a statement.
Big Blue said the new offering includes “full support for standard file access protocols so that moving data into and out of [the] storage cloud is as simple as a file copy operation.”
In addition to internal enterprise clouds, IBM also plans a business-grade public storage cloud, with flexible consumption models and a self-service user interface.
The IBM Information Archive combines disk, tape, deduplication and compression to minimize storage costs. Its architecture uses GPFS, Tivoli Storage Manager and Enhanced Tamper Protection for performance and security, with a choice of data protection levels.
IBM said Information Archive is the first offering of its new unified archiving strategy, IBM Smart Archive, which is “designed to help clients to extract value and gain new intelligence from the vast amounts of information by collecting, organizing, analyzing, trusting and leveraging that information.”
Symantec’s Cloud File System
Symantec unveiled FileStore, a file-based storage architecture designed for private and public clouds, and the company also said it expects to release an object-based file system next year, codenamed “S4.”
FileStore, based on the Veritas Cluster File System, is the file-based storage architecture for Symantec’s own cloud services, which boast more than 40 petabytes of online storage for more than 9 million users. It can boost storage utilization rates and eliminate planned downtime, and it supports NFS, CIFS, FTP and HTTP.
FileStore integrates natively with Symantec offerings such as NetBackup and Endpoint Protection, which run directly on FileStore nodes to boost performance.
A single FileStore system scales up to 16 nodes and 2PB of storage. Pricing starts at $6,995 for two nodes and two CPU sockets.
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