As an IBM Business Partner faced with a growing set of options around hybrid clouds, zeroing in on that special sauce that gives you and your clients a competitive edge can be overwhelmingly challenging. Software defined storage (SDS) has been positioned by storage analysts as one of the critical technologies that can really help clients in their journey to the cloud—private or public.

To that end, the IBM Spectrum Storage™ family, with its extensive support for public, private and hybrid cloud deployments, has the special sauce you need. Whether deploying IBM Spectrum Scale™, IBM Spectrum Protect™ or the recently announced—in early November 2016—IBM Spectrum Virtualize™ software, the IBM Spectrum™ family delivers the essential hybrid cloud storage solutions for your customers.

The IBM Spectrum Storage family has been a leader in SDS from its inception; it was named #1 in SDS by storage analyst firm IDC in 2014 and 2015. And it continued its strong leadership position in 1H 2016—hitting less than 31 percent market share in SDS for Q2 2016. That leadership position continues in the second half of 2016 with IBM Spectrum Virtualize software being named the winner of the 2016 CRN Tech Innovation Award in the Virtualization category.

What does this leadership have to do with hybrid clouds? Because IBM Spectrum Virtualize software is now available in a software-only version (meaning that it can be deployed on standard x86-supported Intel servers), it can now be used for much more than virtualizing and optimizing Fibre Channel storage and SANs. In fact, one of the most prevalent use cases for IBM Spectrum Virtualize is the replication of data from any-to-any storage infrastructures, which is a widespread use case in hybrid cloud environments. In these configurations, your users are trying to migrate or move or back up data from a traditional data center to a cloud deployment.

According to a recent survey by Technology Business Research, “Cloud Business Quarterly Semiannual Report, Hybrid Cloud Customer Research 2H16,” disaster recovery (DR) and backup are the most adopted infrastructure workloads among hybrid cloud users. In addition, they have the highest planned adoption as users back up more data to private clouds.¹

And many angles need to be considered for interoperability, especially for creating a DR solution in a hybrid cloud environment. Infrastructure differences between on-premises solutions and either private or public clouds offering disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) can impose challenges for clients when replicating the data to the secondary site. Either equivalent storage is needed on both the primary site and cloud location, or compute resources can be impacted to replicate the data at an application or middleware level. IBM Spectrum Virtualize software—with its more than 13-year history of global deployments as part of the IBM® Storwize® family and IBM SAN Volume Controller—is a well-suited SDS solution to bridge that gap.

Using Global Mirror for IP replication technology in IBM Spectrum Virtualize, a client can build a DR solution today between on-premises data centers and private clouds, which is storage agnostic and interoperable with almost 400 different back-end storage arrays. For any client that may want to deploy this software in a cloud—either in its own cloud or through a cloud service provider (CSP) or managed service provider (MSP)—IBM Spectrum Virtualize can now be purchased as a software-only offering. And it’s available in a fully inclusive license at a flat capacity usage model. The software can be purchased either in a perpetual license or as a pay-as-you-go license that is USD68 per terabyte—based on storage capacity unit list price. This monthly pay-as-you-go license is well suited for new clients who are actually service providers and would like more flexibility to help reduce their risk and up-front CAPEX and OPEX investments.

Learn more about how IBM Spectrum Virtualize helps your clients gain greater flexibility with essential software for cloud deployments.