IBM Launches New Hybrid Cloud-Focused Products

IBM has launched several new hybrid cloud-focused products to help SMBs take full advantage of the data generated by their businesses.

The first is a new addition to its Storwize virtualising RAID storage range. The V5000 will, IBM claims, enable SMBs to face the challenge of needing to store, access, analyse and share ever increasing amounts of data.

The company describes it as a “flexible entry into the advanced management capabilities and performance of the Storwize family”, which can be configured with disk and flash drives, supports IBM Easy Tier automation technology, and features built-in support for the open source OpenStack cloud operating system.

“The cloud-ready system…can help clients build private and hybrid cloud storage architectures, while virtualisation and clustering capabilities help them take advantage of true Software Defined Storage that grows and adapts with their changing businesses,” the organisation said.

The second SMB-focused cloud announcement was a refresh of the IBM Technical Computing portfolio to include IBM Application Ready Solutions, its NeXtScale System platform, and IBM Platform Computing software that is optimised for compute and data-intensive workloads.

According to the company, these offerings can be either used to create a private cloud, or deployed in public clouds.

The news follows other announcements made at the conference that Big Blue will be using the technology gained from its acquisition of SoftLayer to build out its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) portfolio.

Dennis Quan, vice president of IBM Cloud Infrastructure Services, said: “We believe cloud is going to be a transformational engine that is driving growth for our customers.

“With today’s latest offerings, IBM is continuing to move its cloud strategy forward by helping put the tools for business innovation directly in the hands of leaders tasked with reshaping their organisation’s vision.”