Redsis partners with IBM to deliver a transformative storage solution for Fox TeleColombia

Fox TeleColombia is a television production company headquartered in Bogotá, Colombia. The company has established itself as one of the most important production companies in Latin America in recent years due to the success of scripted, unscripted, documentary and sports content on both cable and broadcast television.

With so many productions in the pipeline at any given time, Fox TeleColombia’s storage system was being pushed past its limits. Not only was the capacity insufficient, but the siloed nature of the storage architecture meant that workloads had to be processed one by one rather than simultaneously, resulting in delays and inefficiencies that decreased productivity. It was clear that the system needed an upgrade.

Working with a forward-looking partner

Media and entertainment clients generally turn to niche solutions to solve storage challenges. These solutions are typically vendor-locked and can be very expensive.

But Fox TeleColombia went to Redsis for a plan of action. Redsis is an IT services provider serving clients in Latin America for more than 20 years, and an IBM Platinum Business Partner with expert certification in server and storage systems. The company has grown its market share by positioning itself as a strategic partner to its clients, rather than as a vendor of storage solutions or installer of hard drives.

In line with this strategic philosophy, Redsis proposed a solution to Fox TeleColombia that would provide more than mere storage capacity—it would demonstrate the benefits of digital transformation by drawing on IBM solutions.

The thinking behind the solution

Traditional storage can’t respond to the complex process of digital transformation. Dependence on on-premises storage environments can be risky and require high IT maintenance. Hybrid cloud deployments let you scale storage as needed and within a budget you can afford, while offering both high availability (also known as data resilience in production environments) while greatly reducing IT overhead on the client side.

What is high availability? Quite simply, it’s a measure of how successful users’ applications are at performing their required tasks that depend on the files in the database—in this case, video clips. Availability measures need to account for unplanned and planned outages, and the costs of ensuring availability versus the company’s bottom-line expense of downtime.

Improving the availability of additional storage space requires an architecture that can leverage the speed of faster processors, as well as databases that intelligently prioritize access to the client’s most important applications when those applications need it. Redsis consulted the video editors at Fox TeleColombia to understand the needs of their video editing applications.

A software-defined storage strategy

Redsis implemented a software-defined storage strategy in a hybrid cloud environment using IBM Spectrum® Scale. IBM Spectrum Scale provides a global data platform for high-performance, next-generation data services.

IBM Spectrum Scale is a cluster file system that provides concurrent access to files from multiple nodes (such as video-editing suites across the country), enabling high-performance access to a common set of data, supporting both high availability and scalability.

The solution was complemented by robust physical storage: IBM FlashSystem 5035 for flash storage and an IBM TS4500 tape library for highly secure backup storage.

This solution allowed Fox TeleColombia to leverage their existing infrastructure while increasing the amount of available hard disk space by 600 TB. This space can be rapidly freed up and reused by sending information from active hard disk space to backup tape storage. The resulting availability of storage space allowed up to 30 production editors to access the data simultaneously.

Expanded capabilities without expanded costs

After the new storage solution was implemented, Fox TeleColombia saw a significant boost in their data processing capability, resulting in a 60% increase in production. Additionally, they increased savings by 40% by avoiding niche brands and working with IBM Business Partner Redsis as their sole vendor.

IBM’s software-defined storage solutions delivers high quality and performance at a lower cost and gives Fox TeleColombia the option to expand as their needs evolve. The proven results of Fox TeleColombia’s solution also opens the door to additional clients in the region for Redsis.

Source: ibm.com

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Build a simpler, more resilient hybrid cloud with IBM Storage

It’s clear that businesses are embracing hybrid cloud. Indeed, a recent report from the IBM Institute for Business Value states that 97% of business are piloting, implementing or integrating cloud in their operations.

However, as hybrid cloud environments become the norm, businesses must contend with additional IT complexity, public cloud costs and threats from cyberattack and other data destructive events.

Today, IBM® is announcing new capabilities and integrations designed to help organizations reduce IT complexity, deploy cost-effective solutions and improve data and cyber resilience for hybrid cloud environments.

Extending hybrid cloud storage simplicity to Microsoft Azure

One way to reduce hybrid cloud complexity is to ensure consistent function, APIs, management, and user interface across on-premises and public cloud platforms. This can be accomplished with software-defined storage (SDS). That’s where IBM Spectrum® Virtualize for Public Cloud comes in. It’s the cloud-based counterpart of the software in IBM FlashSystem® and SAN Volume Controller.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud provides the same storage functionality in the cloud as you find on-premises, which makes it easy to implement hybrid cloud storage scenarios such as disaster recovery, cloud DevOps, and data migration. And since it provides this same function across clouds, it also makes it easy to use multiple clouds or to move from cloud to cloud.

Now we’re extending our cloud support to Microsoft Azure in addition to IBM Cloud® and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

On Azure, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud supports IBM Safeguarded Copy, which automatically creates isolated immutable snapshot copies designed to be inaccessible by software – including malware – and which can be used to recover on-premises or cloud data quickly in the event of a data destructive event.

Expediting Turbonomic integration for automated operations

IBM recently acquired Turbonomic, an Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) software provider. By acquiring Turbonomic, IBM is the only company that will be able to provide customers with AI-powered automation capabilities that span from AIOps to application and infrastructure observability.

IBM and Turbonomic plan to deliver rapid benefits for customers of IBM FlashSystem by improving application performance awareness and automation.

◉ Turbonomic will collect information from IBM FlashSystem storage including storage capacity, IOPS, and latency for each storage array.

◉ Turbonomic’s analysis engine combines FlashSystem data, virtualization data and application data to continuously automate non-disruptive actions and ensure applications get the storage performance they require.

This can eliminate the need for unnecessary over-provisioning and safely increase density without sacrificing performance. On average, customers can increase density by 30% without any application performance impact.

For environments using Instana®, Red Hat® OpenShift®, or any major hypervisor (such as VMware vSphere) with IBM FlashSystem, Turbonomic will observe the entire stack from application to array. This enables all operations teams to quickly visualize and automate corrective actions to mitigate performance risk caused by resource congestion, while safely increasing density.

Other key storage enhancements

We’re continuing to enhance the data and cyber resilience capabilities of our storage platform to help customers combat the threat of ransomware and other data destructive events. Enhancements include:

◉ IBM Spectrum Protect Plus offers a suite of enhancements specifically designed for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes to support data protection for containerized environments. These include Red Hat certification, support for OpenShift workloads deployed on Azure and direct backup to S3 object storage.

◉ IBM Spectrum Protect now supports replicating backup data to additional data protection servers.Additionally, IBM Spectrum Protect now supports using object storage for long-term data retention to reduce the cost of backup.

◉ IBM Spectrum Scale global data fabric gains a new high-performance S3 object interface. This means that cloud native S3 applications can provide faster results without the typical delay for object storage. Additionally, a new GPU direct storage (GDS) interface enables NVIDIA applications to run up to 100% faster with IBM Spectrum Scale.

◉ IBM Elastic Storage® System 3200 now includes a 38TB IBM FlashCore® Module. This new FlashCore Module is double the size of the previous, largest option, doubling the capacity of an ESS 3200 to 912TB in only 2 rack units.

Source: ibm.com

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Data resilience and storage — a primer for your business

Data resilience has become increasingly vital to modern businesses. Your ability to protect against and recover from malicious attacks and other outages greatly contributes to your business success. Resilient primary storage is a core component of data resilience, but what is it exactly?

Read on to get answers to important questions about data resilience and to see how resilient primary storage for your data can help your business thrive.

What is data resilience?

Data resilience is the ability to protect against and recover quickly from a data-destructive event, such as a cyberattack, data theft, disaster, failure or human error. It’s an important component of your organization’s overall cyber resilience strategy and business continuity plan.

Keeping your data — and your entire IT infrastructure — safe in the event of cyberattack is crucial. A 2020 report by Enterprise Strategy Group found that 60% of enterprise organizations experienced ransomware attacks in the past year and 13% of those organizations experienced daily attacks. Each data breach, according to the Ponemon Institute, can cost an average of  USD 3.86 million. By 2025, cybercrime costs are estimated to reach USD 10.5 trillion annually, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.

In addition to combating malicious attacks, data resilience is vital to preventing data loss and helping you recover from natural disasters and unplanned failures. Extreme weather events such as floods, storms and wildfires are increasing in number and severity, and affect millions of people and businesses all over the world each year. In 2018, the global economic stress and damage from natural disasters totaled USD 165 billion, according to the World Economic Forum in their 2020 Global Risks Report.

While the first order of business is to prevent data-destructive events from occurring, it’s equally important to be able to recover when the inevitable happens and an event, malicious or otherwise, takes place.

Your preparedness and ability to quickly respond hinges on where you are storing your primary data. Is the solution resilient? Ensuring your data stays available to your applications is the primary function of storage. So, what are the characteristics of resilient primary storage that can help?

5 characteristics of a resilient storage solution

A resilient storage solution provides flexibility and helps you leverage your infrastructure vendors and locations to create operational resiliency – achieving data resilience in the data center and across virtualized, containerized and hybrid cloud environments.

Characteristics of resilient primary storage include:

1. 2-site and 3-site replication: capable of traditional 2-site and 3-site replication configurations – on premises, on cloud, or hybrid – using your choice of synchronous or asynchronous data communication. This gives you confidence that your data can survive a localized disaster with very little or no data loss, also known as recovery point objective (RPO).

2. High availability: the ability to gain access to your data quickly, in some cases immediately, which is also known as recovery time objective (RTO). Resilient storage has options for immediate failover access to data at remote locations. Not only does your data survive a localized disaster, but your applications have immediate access to alternate copies as if nothing ever happened.

3. Enhanced high availability: multi-platform support. This means RPO/RTO options available regardless of your choice in primary storage hardware vendors or public cloud providers.

4. Immutable copy: making copies that are logically air-gapped from the primary data, and further making that copy unchangeable, or immutable, in the event your primary data copy becomes infected.

5. Encryption: protecting your data from bad actors and guarding against prying eyes or outright data theft.

How can I ensure my organization has data resilience?

Many organizations have a mix of different on-premises storage vendors or have acquired storage capacity over time, meaning they have different generations of storage systems. Throw in some cloud storage for a hybrid environment and you may find it quite difficult to deliver a consistent approach to data resilience.

A first step is modernizing the storage infrastructure you already have. Fortunately, this is not something that requires you wait for a lease to expire or for data growth to drive a new hardware purchase. You can get started right away with software-defined storage from IBM on your existing storage from most any vendor.

IBM FlashSystem® and IBM SAN Volume Controller, both built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize software, will include a Safeguarded Copy function that creates immutable (read-only) copies of your data to protect against ransomware and other threats. This functionality is also available on IBM Storage for mainframe systems.

Additionally, you can combine the data resilience capabilities of IBM FlashSystem and IBM Spectrum® Protect Plus to create a highly resilient IT infrastructure for on-premises, cloud and containerized environments. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is available at a special rate when purchasing a FlashSystem 5000 or 5200.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM Spectrum LSF goes multicloud

IBM is moving swiftly to implement multicloud capabilities across both our IBM Spectrum Storage and IBM Spectrum Computing portfolios. In an important step for our high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, today we’re announcing the release of a deployment guide that facilitates the use of IBM Spectrum LSF Suite with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

IBM Spectrum LSF Suite is a comprehensive set of solutions supporting traditional HPC and high-throughput environments, as well as big data, artificial intelligence (AI), GPU, machine learning, and containerized workloads among many others. IBM Spectrum LSF, the core of the Suite, is a workload and resource management platform for demanding, distributed HPC environments. It provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features that help maximize utilization of compute infrastructure resources while optimizing application performance.

IBM Spectrum LSF Suite comes in three editions and includes additional capabilities such as  LSF resource connector, which enables policy-driven cloud bursting to all major cloud services, including IBM Cloud, AWS, Google and Azure.

The newly released deployment guide builds on an existing relationship with AWS. IBM is providing expertise, services, and management capabilities that will give IBM Spectrum LSF customers fast, flexible access to AWS offerings.

The new deployment guide helps users build a wide range of customizable IBM Spectrum LSF cluster configurations that can enable users to take advantage of cloud computing. In particular, HPC environments can leverage the cloud during times of peak activity. To accommodate spikes in demand, traditional HPC environments often divide up jobs and stretch out scheduling–but this can lengthen time to insight. IBM Spectrum LSF solutions can help address this challenge by enabling dynamic access to cloud resources.

Two of the most common IBM Spectrum LSF cluster solutions are the LSF Stretch Cluster and the LSF Multi Cluster configurations. In the LSF Stretch Cluster architecture, the master scheduler and other core functionality remain with the on-premises IBM Spectrum LSF cluster, but the cluster resources can be dynamically “stretched” over a WAN to include cloud resources.

The Multi Cluster configuration, on the other hand, essentially creates two clusters, one on premises and one in the cloud. This architecture can simplify communication and coordination between the on-premises and cloud-based clusters.

Both configurations offer certain advantages and trade-offs, and both configurations are covered in detail by the new deployment guide.

With the release of the new LSF cloud deployment guide, enterprises and HPC facilities can more easily build the IBM Spectrum LSF cluster architectures that are best for them. Then they can leverage the power of IBM Spectrum Scale–the high-performance data management member of the IBM Spectrum Storage family–to enable the storage portion of the overall solution. The multicloud reach of IBM Spectrum Scale includes Spectrum Scale on AWS, available on AWS Marketplace. Currently available as a Bring Your Own License offering, the service is targeted at IBM customers who want to gain access to the elasticity of AWS for their high-performance computing workloads, allowing deployment of highly available, scalable cluster file systems on AWS. IBM provides a Cloud Formation script that deploys IBM Spectrum Scale across a cluster of AWS virtual server instances.

Release of the new LSF cloud deployment guide marks yet another milestone in the ongoing expansion of IBM Spectrum LSF multicloud capabilities, but it’s not the only important news for IBM customers. IBM is also announcing variable use licensing for IBM Spectrum LSF. This new “bite-sized” licensing will allow users to purchase licenses for IBM Spectrum LSF in blocks of CPU “core hours.” One block equals 1000 core hours. The new licensing will make IBM Spectrum LSF even easier and more flexible to deploy. IBM Spectrum LSF users will be able to run the solution almost anywhere and pay only for what they use rather than predicting and hoping.

Across the entire IBM Spectrum Computing portfolio, plenty of innovation is occurring, with plenty more on the roadmap. As enterprises and HPC facilities search for new cloud usage paradigms, they will likely look to intelligent solutions that leverage multicloud architectures and make them easier and less complex to adopt.

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