Before anything else, let’s start with a few questions:
- Are you facing a challenge of supplying storage to meet ever-changing demands of virtualization administrators, while creating and mapping endless amounts of storage volumes?
- Do you need to self-provision storage for your VMs, and also better integrate your virtual machines with storage arrays?
- Do your container clusters require storage for containerized applications?
- Do you want to automate storage provisioning by using Microsoft PowerShell?
If you’ve answered “Yes” to any of the above questions, IBM Spectrum Connect is available and ready to serve you. Formerly named IBM Spectrum Control Base Edition, IBM Spectrum Connect encompasses everything that you might need for integrating your multi-cloud environments with supported IBM storage systems, from an all-in-one, easy-to-use server platform.
Simply put, IBM Spectrum Connect is a centralized cloud integration system that consolidates a range of IBM storage provisioning, automation, and monitoring solutions through a unified server platform. It provides a single server, small-footprint backend location and enables centralized management of IBM storage resources for different virtualization, cloud and container platforms.
By implementing advanced storage provisioning techniques, IBM Spectrum Connect allows storage and hybrid cloud administrators to supply and integrate IBM storage with a range of VMware solutions, Kubernetes container clusters, and Microsoft PowerShell automation methods. IBM Spectrum Connect provides a web-based UI that makes this entire administration easy and straightforward, and saves a significant amount of time in setting up, connecting, and integrating the required storage resources into your cloud environment.
To enable this wide range of functional integration possibilities, the IBM Spectrum Connect suite includes the following individual cloud interfaces:
- IBM Storage Provider for VMware VASA
- IBM Storage Enhancements for VMware vSphere Web Client
- IBM Storage Plug-in for VMware vRealize Orchestrator
- IBM Storage Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations Manager
- IBM Storage Enabler for Containers
- IBM Storage Automation Plug-in for Microsoft PowerShell
Cedric Cook, our Product Offering manager, covers all this in further detail in the following developerWorks blog:
The first version of IBM Spectrum Connect is 3.4.0, continuing from the previous version line of IBM Spectrum Control Base Edition. Under the new brand name, it is still available at no extra cost for IBM Storage customers. Check out the formal IBM Spectrum Connect brand page at: ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/spectrum-connect.
For the first time, you can download Spectrum Connect directly from the brand page by clicking Download Now.
And last but not least, we also have a new IBM Knowledge Center space where you can find the complete documentation for IBM Spectrum Connect: ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS6JWS.
As always, we’d be happy to receive any feedback, questions, or suggestions that you may have.
Thanks for tuning in!
The IBM Spectrum Connect team