IBM Spectrum Virtualize is a software product that IBM makes available with its enterprise array technology. It allows storage from separate storage systems to be managed as a single logical pool of capacity. In doing so, storage management features such as auto-tiering can be applied across all storage and managed from a “single pane of glass”.
With the growth of public cloud adoption, IBM has added cloud capability to the portfolio with Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, which extends the software’s ability to manage storage functions across on-premises storage as well as storage on IBM Cloud, AWS and Azure.
The premise of a single point of management and pooled storage capacity remains, giving users the ability to roll IBM storage management, resilience and performance features across pooled storage which may reside in the cloud, on-premises and even on third-party storage.
It is useful to think of IBM Spectrum Virtualize as an operating system for storage, and using it with versions that support public cloud and FlashSystem makes it incredibly simple to move data between on-premises and public cloud locations.
This hybrid functionality has led to valuable use cases being made possible when using IBM Spectrum Virtualize in hybrid environments. As an example, it adds an extra dimension to the Safeguarded Copy functionality, allowing air-gapped snapshots of business data to be copied between on-prem and the cloud – which can be used for disaster recovery scenarios such as recovery from a ransomware attack.
Compared to other cloud storage management software, IBM Spectrum Virtualize has a long history and evolved from IBM SAN Volume Manager. This means it is established and proven storage virtualisation. This on-premises credibility, combined with evolution into cloud storage options, makes it the most comprehensive storage management and virtualised platform available for hybrid environments.
