IBM force push Smarcloud Cloud storage Service

Whether it's a private cloud, a public cloud, or a mixed cloud, there is a common goal of preparing certain information technologies for service forms. With this service, non-IT professionals, such as departmental administrators, do not need the help of IT professionals to prepare IT resources. This will bring more benefits.

For example, non-IT pros do not need to accommodate the IT pros because some support is a priority for non-IT pros, and for IT pros, it may be just c. In addition, such services allow IT workers to make better use of their own time and focus on tasks that can create higher value for the enterprise.

However, while it is certain that business users can benefit from these services, including increasing efficiency (reducing the time, effort and cost of doing a specific job) and benefits (which can accomplish more high-value work), providing a service is not an easy task.

Service-type storage (Storage as service)

IBM recently released a new service called SmartCloud Storage Access, which helps IT departments provide service-type storage for their users through a private cloud. IBM SmartCloud Storage Access is a software that can be run on a VMware based virtual machine in a private data center.

The path is provided through a web-based portal based on a graphical user interface that provides self-service storage capacity preparation for users and performs monitoring and reporting tasks for the specified service level. This software can work with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC) or IBM's Virtual Storage Center (TPC), in a background storage system (or IBM's Storwize V7000 Unified or Sonas) to complete the actual operation.

While non-IT professionals may be using the service themselves, the more common user is the department administrator who has a certain understanding of the team's storage requirements. Those users may include administrators who lead the medical team, his team needs to be responsible for medical imaging, the research institute manager who leads the project, the research projects that require a large amount of storage capacity, or the administrators of large organizations who manage electronic content.

Now, non-IT administrators who use SmartCloud Storage Access can decide on the storage capacity and the level of service required.

But what happens if an administrator specifies a storage capacity that exceeds the required capacity and always wants to achieve a level of service that is higher than the actual demand?

First, storage capacity is allocated only when real requirements arise (by automatically streamlining configuration), so there is no need to be busy buying large amounts of storage capacity. Second, SmartCloud Storage Access includes an approval control process that allows administrators to use the system only within their respective areas of responsibility and not to use them ultra vires. In other words, the system should have sufficient restrictive mechanisms to ensure that there are no errors and that the negative effects are minimized.

For IBM's new services to work, it must be very comfortable with the fact that the decisions they make now will be implemented automatically or used by the policy engine.

There is a certain risk. After all, if something fails, it still has to take responsibility. However, the benefit of this is that when IBM's SmartCloud Storage access becomes part of their tools, IT administrators can shift their attention to more interesting, challenging, and potentially more rewarding tasks.

The biggest challenge facing the cloud today is how it helps to provide users with a variety of features that provide value to the latter. This redistribution implies that service users do not have to have professional technical knowledge, as long as they can specify what they need based on relatively simple policy guidelines.

In fact, IBM's SmartCloud Storage access shows that the market demand for this type of service storage pattern is real, and IBM's new product just released its first version. IBM may have developed a product development plan, such as supporting object storage. Supporting object storage extends the application of SmartCloud Storage access from a private cloud to a public cloud domain.