IBM Spectrum Scale for AI and Highly Scalable Infrastructure

Scaling AI and infrastructure

Organizations often struggle with data management as their data volumes and use cases increase. This has been especially true with the adoption of AI and the integration of ML/DL into all parts of data analytics. To keep up with the changing requirements, WWT uses the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to continually evaluate the latest innovations and platforms to drive our recommendations to fit our customers' business needs. 

WWT has seen a large increase in customers experiencing problems related to data management and growth. To help customers navigate the AI landscape, WWT has teamed up with IBM to help build skills and familiarity with their software-defined storage offerings, starting with IBM Spectrum Scale. 

IBM Spectrum Scale

WWT has customers of all sizes with growing data challenges. The appeal of IBM Spectrum Scale has been its ability to deliver extreme performance along with enterprise grade features like tiering, audit logs, snapshots, containerization, enhanced security and global data sharing. IBM Spectrum Scale is one of the few technologies that can help customers work towards a true global data platform that is purpose-built for hybrid cloud flexibility and agility.  

The need for data availability from edge to core to cloud can also be addressed with IBM's software-defined storage. IBM Spectrum Scale can be deployed in different configurations, including via public clouds, to unify data access with a single global filesystem, automated data placement and caching for performance. IBM Spectrum Scale is multi-protocol, supporting standard network access, optimized high-performance or object access to the same data. Across the global data platform, IBM Spectrum Scale can ingest, work with and export data from Linux, Windows or MVS environments, while simultaneously working with block, file and object data.

Having a single flexible and diverse storage solution means that you can collapse silos and buy storage in a way that is simpler to manage and grow and is a lot more cost-effective. For example, you can set up one data platform that can serve data to a data lake, an AI machine learning team and IBM Cloud Pak deployments all at the same time. WWT can help customers save time and money while accelerating the migration to a simplified platform. More importantly, we can give them the performance and QoS they need for their most demanding users with a software-defined storage approach with unprecedented scalability.

For customers that are modernizing applications or shifting to cloud-native, full container support is built into IBM Spectrum Scale. Container-based applications require distributed storage, and the platform should be designed with containers in mind to ensure that the data is in the right place at the right time. IBM Spectrum Scale has a feature used for global data sharing called AFM, or Active File Management. This allows synchronous or asynchronous movement of data with only changes sent over the WAN, enabling customers to share data globally.

In addition to being used as the backbone of the world's most powerful supercomputers, IBM Spectrum Scale has also been deployed for data-intensive tasks such as high speed backup, multi-site backup and disaster recovery. Customers are often subject to regulations that demand multiple offsite copies of data. By taking advantage of data tiering, customers can manage data from creation to long-term archival on a single platform without third-party backup solutions.

Learn more

WWT and IBM are working together to bring new capabilities to our customers, and we can now deliver a single solution that provides both unparalleled performance and scalability with container-native storage for any environment. Contact us today to learn more.