IBM typically only reports storage hardware revenues in its financial results; however it announced that for Q4 2017 software accounted for 42% of the storage division’s revenues. I’ve included my estimates for its storage hardware and software revenues in the Figure above.
Back in 2015 IBM corralled all of its storage software products under the Spectrum brand. Originally the naming was based on generic functions, but its latest offerings include the technology-specific title ‘NAS’. Its latest announcements include its:
- Spectrum NAS – a software approach to building network attached storage solutions using industry standard x86 servers. It is based NFS and SMV/CIFS networking protocols and has a simple configurator tool.
- Spectrum Protect 8.1.5 – adding audit logging and tracking of meta data for requirements of the EU’s GDPR regulation coming in May this year,
- Spectrum Protect Plus on the IBM Cloud, which allows secure backups to be made when storing them on the IBM (SoftLayer) Cloud; it indicated that versions for AWS and Azure will come later.
Spectrum NAS is an interesting offering – IBM has gone ‘software-only’ in an area where it used to have hardware (it no longer supplies either NAS arrays or industry standard x86 servers).
When the Spectrum range was introduced I had trouble remembering which product names were renamed. Now I have difficulty because there are so many different offerings! So my Table below is designed as an aide memoir:
Table – IBM Spectrum offerings, functions and relationships as of February 2018
| Product | What it does | Related to |
| Accelerate | Block-level clustered storage | XIV Software |
| Archive | Data archive and retention | Linear Tape File System (LTFS) |
| Computing | Workload and policy-driven resource management for HPC infrastructure | Hadoop and Spark |
| Connect | Manage storage in docker, VMware, Powershell | Accelerate, Virtualize driven and DS8000 systems |
| Control | Analytics-driven data management | Virtual Storage Center |
| Copy Data Management | Automate the creation and use of copy data | DevOps |
| NAS | Network attached storage systems | NFS, SMB, Microsoft, virtual machines |
| Protect | Long-term data protection | Tivoli Storage Manager |
| Protect Plus | Secure backup for public clouds | IBM Cloud (AWS and Azure coming later) |
| Scale | Scalable storage for unstructured data | Elastic Storage/General Parallel File System (GPFS) |
| Virtualize | Heterogeneous storage hypervising | Storwize, SAN Volume Controller |
Source: ITCandor, 2018
For customers who are unsure of the capabilities of each product, IBM offers Spectrum Storage and Spectrum Protection Suites, allowing them to test and develop multiple elements and giving significant discounts over each bought separately for those which are put into production.
For more details about IBM Storage’s February announcements see my latest research post.
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