After a somewhat reluctant foray into Cloud Computing, IBM is trying to put its act together on the cloud front. After their workload based offerings, they have turned their attention to Cloud Storage business. Yesterday, at their Information Infrastructure Analyst Summit, IBM launched the following two storage related services along with a bunch of their cloud consultancy offerings.

• Smart Business Storage Cloud
• IBM Information Archive

Well, the second one is not a cloud based solution but a solution based on a new technology that uses a mix of both disk and tape. However, the Smart Business Storage Cloud is a private cloud offering and IBM has plans for a public offering sometime in the future.

IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud is built on top of reliable General Parallel File System (GPFS) with an ability to scale up and down seamlessly. This storage virtualization solution provides

• Virtualized storage enabling storage consolidation
• A management platform that helps minimize outages, manage labor demands, costs, etc.
• An advanced data replication technology for business continuity and DR

It is neither a record based storage like databases nor a block based storage like the offerings of some of the other cloud storage players. Rather, it is a file based storage system that can be used to store files like digital media, medical imaging, web content, analytics, modeling data, etc.. It offers support for multiple petabytes of capacity, billions of files, and scale-out performance previously limited to the largest ‘high performance computing’ systems. It is also designed to make use of a client’s existing security and authentication infrastructure. This highly scalable and secure storage service is well suited for modern day enterprises which generate data at a pace never witnessed anytime in the past.

This can be deployed either on-premise or with one of the managed datacenter service providers. Such a private cloud storage can alleviate enterprise concerns about security, vendor lock-in concerns and, also, the huge migration costs involved with any move to public cloud storage.

The other offering, IBM Information Archive, is also part of their Smart Business System offerings. This is a hardware software combination that could help enterprises address their complete information retention needs, including business, legal and regulatory, and enables organizations to leverage different tiers of storage, including disk and tape, with policy-based management that automatically moves less active information to more cost-effective storage systems. This could scale up to 304 TB of raw capacity with a low TCO.

They have also added three new cloud consulting services to their already existing portfolio of consulting services. These include

• Strategy and Change Services for Cloud Adoption – IBM consultants can help firms determine how to get started with cloud adoption by quickly identifying priority business areas; acknowledging key gaps in processes, technology, organization and governance; and evaluating the range of new cloud-based delivery models in order to develop a roadmap for piloting cloud. 
• IBM Strategy and Change Services for Cloud Providers – For firms looking to enter the cloud provider market, IBM can help define an in-depth roadmap that treats cloud as a new operating model rather than just a method of IT delivery -- an essential step in business model evolution. 
• IBM Testing Services for Cloud – IBM can also help companies build a business case that quantifies the cost, schedule and quality improvements associated with pursing a cloud application test environment. This can help reduce capital expenses by provisioning test servers on demand, decreasing the cost of test setup and tear-down and associated defects, while shortening overall cycle time.

To be frank, these are just a potpourri of consulting services designed to keep their existing business intact. I am more excited about their foray into Cloud Storage business. Even though the current offering is not very attractive in terms of the cost, I am very keen to know about their public cloud storage offerings. In fact, the public storage solutions has more disruptive potential than the above mentioned private cloud solutions. As I have mentioned in one of my past posts, it is important for the cloud ecosystem to have IBM to be part of the marketplace. The legitimacy offered by IBM in the enterprise cloud play will be important to lure more and more enterprises to jump into cloud based services.