IBM Dropping Its ‘Spectrum’ Storage Brand
‘At IBM, we are constantly seeking out ways to enhance and simplify our customer experience. To that end, IBM Storage is reimagining its portfolio and aligning the offerings with what we’ve heard our clients need most now. Will be providing more information on this in the following weeks,’ says IBM in response to a question about the future of the ‘Spectrum’ brand.
IBM is planning to drop the use of “Spectrum” as its storage brand in favor of a new brand to be disclosed later.
IBM in an email confirmed the upcoming change in its storage branding, which was first reported by Blocks and Files.
Details about the new branding for IBM storage will come soon, IBM said.
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“At IBM, we are constantly seeking out ways to enhance and simplify our customer experience. To that end, IBM Storage is reimagining its portfolio and aligning the offerings with what we’ve heard our clients need most now. Will be providing more information on this in the following weeks,” IBM said in its response, without attribution to a specific executive.
IBM in early 2015 first introduced Spectrum as a brand for its software-defined storage technology. That was about a week after IBM unveiled plans to invest over $1 billion in its storage software portfolio over the next five years, with a focus on R&D in cloud storage, object storage, and storage for OpenStack and other open-standard technologies.
This follows IBM’s April 2013 move to invest $1 billion in its flash storage business with a “channel-first” strategy.
The IBM Spectrum line includes:
* IBM Spectrum Control for monitoring and analytics
* IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management for automating data center copy management processes
* IBM Spectrum Protect for data resilience
* IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for protecting virtual and SaaS workloads and containers
* IBM Spectrum Archive for tape storage
* IBM Spectrum Sentinel for detecting and recovering from ransomware attacks
* IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud to replicate or migrate data between on-premises and public clouds
* IBM Spectrum Fusion for container-native data storage and protection*IBM Spectrum Discover to simplify data for AI
* IBM Spectrum Scale for next-generation data services
* IBM Spectrum Conductor for managing application services using shared resources
* IBM Spectrum Symphony for managing data-intensive distributed applications
* IBM Spectrum LFS Suites to manage high performance computing workloads
* IBM Spectrum MPI for accelerating high-performance application parallelization
IBM has changed the brand names for its storage technologies a few times over the years, said John Zawistowski, global systems solutions executive at Sycomp, a Foster City, Calif.-based solution provider and IBM storage channel partner.
“The name changes seem to be in alignment with IBM’s journey to the cloud,” Zawistowski told CRN. “But it’s still IBM’s product set. Just a name change.”
For Sycomp, the biggest impact will probably be the need to change the branding of its own offerings based on IBM Spectrum storage, Zawistowski said.
“We’ll have to change our branding in the cloud,” he said. “We have been offering ‘Sycomp Storage Fueled By IBM Spectrum Scale.’”
That Sycomp offering simplifies the deployment of IBM Spectrum Scale to public clouds by taking out all the complication that comes from a product that was designed for deployment on multiple infrastructures, Zawistowski said.
“We can stand up a petabyte of storage in the cloud in 45 minutes,” he said. “On-prem, it might take three to four days. And our performance is up there with the best using AI and machine learning workloads using either persistent storage or ephemeral data.”
Sycomp currently offers its IBM Spectrum Scale on Azure, and expects to unveil a version for Google Cloud Platform on March 1.