The majority of organizations today use a mix of on-premises, edge and public cloud infrastructure. This should be no surprise: according to one recent study, companies derive up to 2.5x the value from hybrid cloud than from a single-cloud, single-vendor approach.[1] But as environments grow, pain points related to managing applications across various IT infrastructures grow as well.

Left unchecked, these challenges – including a lack of visibility, maintaining regulatory compliance and latency issues – can lead to decreased productivity, compromised data security and negative user experiences.

So how can you solve these problems and continue to capitalize on hybrid and multicloud adoption?

Enter IBM® Cloud Satellite™, which provides standardized, consistent cloud services across all on-premises, edge and public cloud infrastructure from any cloud vendor. It helps you to manage applications with full visibility across all environments, improving developer productivity, data security and customer experiences.

To understand how IBM Cloud Satellite brings hybrid cloud to the edge, watch our explainer video.

Choosing the right storage solution for IBM Cloud Satellite

IBM Cloud Satellite is supported by IBM hybrid cloud software-defined storage (SDS) solutions: IBM Spectrum® Virtualize and IBM Spectrum® Scale. Deploying IBM Cloud Satellite on premises allows you to choose which storage infrastructure to use:

• Block storage: IBM FlashSystem® family and IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), both built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize
• File storage: IBM Elastic Storage® System (ESS) or an IBM Spectrum Scale software-defined solution

In many cases, this means you can use the IBM storage you already have, which speeds initial implementation, likely reduces costs and means you don’t have to learn how to use a whole new type of storage.

For system data and for high-performance applications such as database workloads, block storage may be your best choice. IBM FlashSystem family and SVC offer enterprise-class storage function, NVMe high performance and great ease of use. All members of the family are built with the same IBM Spectrum Virtualize software. This means that for multiple Satellite deployments, all of your storage works the same way and there’s nothing to re-learn. IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud provides the same storage functionality on IBM Cloud, AWS, and soon Microsoft Azure, which simplifies hybrid cloud storage deployments.

For analytics and AI workloads, file storage may be your best choice. ESS nodes deliver either high-performance NVMe storage technology or high-capacity low-cost storage. This gives users the ability to match the storage to their needs. In addition, ESS comes equipped with the industry-leading global data access and unified data services of IBM Spectrum Scale.

Adding ESS nodes multiplies throughput and capacity to over yottabyte scalability and can be integrated into a federated global storage system. By consolidating storage requirements from cloud to edge to the core data center, IBM Spectrum Scale and ESS can simplify storage management and data access and eliminate data silos.

Soaring with Satellite

IBM Storage solutions integrate with IBM Cloud Satellite using Container Storage Interface and come with Satellite templates to simplify deployment. In addition, these solutions are supported with extensive Red Hat® Ansible® automation playbooks.

These storage solutions enable you to share your storage infrastructure—and in the case of ESS and IBM Spectrum Scale, data too—between IBM Cloud Satellite and your existing platforms, including VMware, IBM Power, and bare metal servers. That means that as your workload deployments change, you can retain your storage infrastructure, helping to save costs and maintain consistency.

IBM FlashSystem and SVC go a step further: Their ability to “virtualize” over 500 existing storage systems from IBM and others means that you can use practically any storage with IBM Cloud Satellite with just a small investment in one of these systems.

These solutions are award-winning and proven for hybrid cloud Red Hat OpenShift® container environments. They are integrated and tested with IBM Cloud Satellite.

Key takeaway: IBM Storage solutions provide a single namespace across all workloads and multiple clouds with automated data movement and local high-performance access, optimizing both performance and cost for hybrid clouds. Whichever workloads you plan to deploy with Satellite, there’s an IBM Storage solution available. You may already have that solution in your data center today!

>> Find out more about IBM Cloud Satellite, IBM FlashSystem family, and IBM storage for AI and analytics.