Migrating to the Cloud

In EETimes:

 " ... IBM is limbering up its cloud storage. Already committing $1.2 billion to establish for-rent datacenters in every country that needs them, today IBM announced a complete hardware/software/storage capability for cloud-based and hybrid users at a claimed 90 percent savings. Key is its software-defined storage-as-a-service, the newest element of IBM's software-defined storage portfolio. Called "Elastic Storage on Cloud," the new capability offered by SoftLayer (which IBM acquired last year) is an outgrowth of the Watson data management system, which beat the world champion humans at TV game show Jeopardy.

"With Elastic Storage on Cloud, we are addressing a new generation of workloads -- cloud analytics and mobile social [trending] -- which are heavily reliant on unstructured data, files, and objects," Bernie Spang, vice president of strategy for software-defined environment told EE Times. "You can have data that needs to be high performance in a flash cache on the server for high performance while moving seldom-used data that does not need low-latency access off to tape -- and it's not archived, it's active. It's just policy-based transparent movement of data to tape for up to 90 percent cost savings." ...'