Demand for speed and analytics drive Cloud Object Storage updates

IBM launched its new Cloud Object Storage services at its THINK conference

Speed is a top priority for businesses moving to the cloud, but moving large files can take hours or days.

To overcome this bottleneck, IBM launched new Cloud Object Storage services at its THINK conference last week.

Philip Buckellew, general manager of Cloud Object Storage at IBM, writes that the intent of the new service is to both speed data transfer and gain ‘instant insights' from that data.

Through a partnership with Aspera, IBM is previewing the new high-speed data transfer option; it claims that transfer rates are as much as five hundred times faster than standard http/ftp.

‘Businesses have moved 100TB of data in 24 hours over a 10Gbps network', Buckellew wrote in his blog.

Aspera's direct-to-cloud technology, which protects data in transit, is built into IBM's Cloud Object Storage.

Another addition to the service is IBM's SQL Query, which customers can use to analyse their data directly in Cloud Object Storage. Data scientists, for example, can get real-time insight from their data streams like IoT messages and raw analytics events.

SQL Query is a serverless service, meaning that there is no set-up time or management of physical storage arrays. The service uses Cloud Object Storage as the underlying data store, making data ‘highly scalable, available and durable'.

The massive growth in unstructured data has driven a demand for low-cost and simple storage options, says IBM, and thus it has introduced an archiving capability to Cloud Object Storage, in addition to the above features.