This article is more than 1 year old

IBM pushes the Accelerate, makes one Big Blue storage family

Info on Software XIV and GPFS revealed – so far

Much ado in Big Blue land today; it is making XIV available as Spectrum Accelerate software-defined storage, while also rebranding GPFS as Spectrum Scale in Linux mainframe environments. There's also a Spectrum Storage family coming.

Based on IBM website information we've seen it looks as if the giant is developing its software-defined storage ideas, with XIV taking the lead.

Big Blue says Spectrum Accelerate is "a software defined storage solution – born of our proven XIV integrated storage offering".

It deploys on a choice of infrastructure, said the company, runs in harmony with XIV Storage systems, and can also run on SoftLayer self-service IaaS (Infrastructure-as-Service).

There is "a flexible licensing model with many features included, based on usable terabytes".

Here, for your pleasure, is an IBM YouTube video about it.

Spectrum Scale

An IBM Redbook reveals new Spectrum Scale branding for its GPFS filesystem tech on Linux mainframe systems. The computing giant said: "New IBM Spectrum Scale for Linux on z Systems is an extremely powerful file system that is based on the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) technology."

The Redbook goes on to say that the "first version of IBM Spectrum Scale for Linux on z Systems is based on IBM Spectrum Scale 4.1 Express Edition, which includes most base level features".

"IBM intends to offer additional functionality that is in the Standard and Advanced Editions in future versions of IBM Spectrum Scale for Linux on z Systems," it continued.

It also shows diagrams about Spectrum Scale deployment possibilities.

GPFS was recently rebranded to Elastic Storage. Why is IBM rebranding it again as Spectrum Scale?

We here at El Reg think further software-defined storage initiatives are coming from IBM; various Spectrum-somethings on top of Spectrum Accelerate and Spectrum Scale.

The Spectrum Accelerate web page has this trinket at the bottom: "Read the announcement of IBM Spectrum Accelerate and the IBM Spectrum Storage family," and offers a web link to IBM press release – where there is no Spectrum Storage family announcement.

We'd strongly suggest you watch this space. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like