Users of non-IBM storage systems can now use IBM’s metadata management software, Spectrum Discover, for unstructured data.
Most companies like to keep their specialty software to themselves, but IBM is making a move to expand its Spectrum Discover metadata management software to support competitive storage products.
Spectrum Discover is modern metadata management software that provides data insight for petabyte-scale unstructured storage. It was designed for IBM Cloud Object Storage and IBM Spectrum Scale, a clustered file system, to rapidly ingest, consolidate and index metadata for billions of files and objects.
Its metadata layer enables storage administrators, data stewards and data scientists to efficiently manage, classify, and gain insights from massive amounts of unstructured data while helping to mitigate risk and accelerate large-scale analytics.
And now it’s coming to competitive storage systems. IBM has announced the availability of connectors for Spectrum Discover to Dell EMC Isilon, NetApp, Amazon S3, Ceph, and other S3- and NFSv3-compliant data sources.
IBM has also added new content-based data classification and tagging capabilities with the ability to extract metadata from over a thousand different file types. It has also added the ability to automatically detect certain types of personally identifiable information (PII) and other types of sensitive data, making it potentially easier for organizations to manage data in compliance with GDPR and other regulations.
“These enhancements are designed to enable your enterprise to create an open and transparent data ecosystem for AI and analytics, make it easier for data scientists to find and curate data for analysis, and enable storage administrators to optimize storage and manage unstructured data,” IBM said in a blog post announcing the news.
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus enhanced
IBM also announced enhancements to IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, its data protection and access control on virtual environments, including integration with IBM tape products, support for Amazon Glacier, Microsoft Azure archive and IBM Cloud Object Storage archive tier, and new disaster recovery from backup repositories running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Other improvements include a new user interface and additional language translations. All of the improvements are aimed at making things easier for partners to help customers perform needed operations in hybrid multicloud environments.
IBM cloud storage improved
Finally, IBM announced the next generation of capabilities for IBM Cloud Object Storage, its cloud-based storage service similar to Amazon Redshift. IBM Cloud Object Storage Gen 2 delivers a new architecture for object storage that’s scalable to over 10 PB in a single rack at a cost of less than one cent per GB per month. It also is now more flexible to allow the creation of tailored configurations that meet unique requirements for performance or capacity.