The era of digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI) is propelling data – and the infrastructure to store, manage, secure and support it – into the spotlight.
Fatima Dawood, Business Development Manager at Pinnacle, explains that data is at the core of all business endeavours today. And this means having the right storage hardware, software, and strategies is more critical than ever.
“It has never been more relevant to protect this data with the ever-increasing threats of cyberattacks in particular,” she says.
“These attacks cost businesses money – whether that’s in the form of ransom payments or the cost of disruption to normal business operations.
“So storage focusing on safeguarding data and quick recovery in the event of data loss is a key focus area for many organisations.”
Efficiency is key in the digital world, so organisations are leaning towards storage modernisation that utilises automation to increase efficiency, reduce planned and unplanned downtime, and reduce dependency on skills.
“Storage modernisation offers several benefits including enhanced data accessibility, increased scalability and flexibility, better security, and improved performance which is crucial for AI deployments, data governance, and improved compliance,” Dawood explains.
The cloud computing trend is seeing a move to hybrid cloud as issues like security, privacy, and data sovereignty become more important.
“A large number of clients are repatriating some workloads from cloud to on-premise, mostly for security reasons,” Dawood says. “Cloud agility in a hybrid environment ensures that organisations continue to get the very best flexibility and economies of scale, no matter if the data is needed on-premises or in the public cloud.”
Pinnacle was recently appointed as a distributor for all of IBM’s enterprise products including servers and storage solutions.
The distributor is certified across the IBM Storage Portfolio and has the knowledge to advise resellers on the full range of IBM Storage Solutions – from infrastructure to client solutions.
Pinnacle provides distribution services to a network of resellers and system integrators, helping them access and distribute IBM technology solutions to their end customers.
“Pinnacle enables and strengthens the relationship between IBM and our partners by creating value that might not otherwise be possible,” Dawood says.
“And, with growing customer demands and changing technology, Pinnacle helps IBM to navigate their complex commerce landscape with a customer-centric perspective, creating value from order to delivery.
“We have also established networks and relationships with resellers that would be difficult for IBM to develop independently,” Dawood says. “These networks will enable IBM to reach a broader market as well as markets that may have been previously inaccessible.”
As a leading distributor, Pinnacle offers reseller partners a number of significant value-adds.
“Pinnacle excels because of our local, personalised services and we can go one step further in tailoring the order experience,” Dawood points out.
For more information, contact us at www.pinnacle.co.za
The IBM storage portfolio
The IBM Storage product portfolio provides a range of hardware and software solutions with a focus on data management.
The IBM Storage offerings are in three distinct pillars: storage for data resilience, storage for data and AI, and storage for hybrid cloud.
Storage for data resilience
With these solutions customers can reduce their threat exposure from days to hours, proactively safeguarding data with a multi-faceted and scalable data resiliency approach that defends their data. These solutions allow users to protect, detect, and recover fast.
Hardware offerings include the IBM Flash System and IBM DS8900 | TS7700.
When it comes to software solutions, customers can implement IBM Storage Insights, IBM Storage Virtualise, IBM Storage Defender, and IBM Storage Protect.
Storage for data and AI
These solutions allow customers to accelerate business results and innovation while unlocking the latent value of unstructured data across the data ecosystem. They can do this by eliminating data silos, advancing data discovery, and classification.
These IBM storage solutions are the on-premise solution for watsonx.
Hardware in the range includes IBM Storage Scale System (SSS) and IBM Fusion HCI System.
Software solutions include IBM Storage Ceph, IBM Cloud Object Storage, and IBM Storage Scale.
Storage for hybrid cloud
Customers can drive innovation and scale application modernisation with enterprise storage that deploys seamlessly across hybrid infrastructures including cloud-native architectures and on-premise.
IBM cloud already deploys IBM Storage Ceph, so compatibility is guaranteed.
Storage hardware for hybrid cloud includes IBM Storage Scale System (SSS) and IBM Fusion HCI System.
Software solutions include IBM Fusion, IBM Storage Ceph and IBM Cloud Object Storage.
Rounding out the IBM storage solution portfolio are IBM Storage Ready Nodes (Ceph, COS and Defender – Data Protect) as well as IBM SAN Networking and Tape.
Revolutionise data storage with IBM FlashSystem grid
IBM FlashSystem grid is a scalable storage platform comprising of multiple FlashSystem or SVC systems that enables operational simplicity through federated management, AI-powered data placement recommendations, and flexible deployment options.
Harness the power of virtualisation and predictive analytics to anticipate storage requirements, dynamically adapting and scaling to meet the needs of a rapidly changing business.
IBM Storage Insights lets users manage their IBM FlashSystem grid, providing an overview of the grid with grouping of systems and the ability to non-disruptively move workloads between systems in the grid. The end goal is to provide a seamless integration and interaction between the on-premises and cloud-based management portals.
It also enables resource optimisation with Virtualize enabling the creation and management of storage partitions that contains all the host-facing logical configuration objects in one easy-to-manage entity.
Importantly, IBM FlashSystem grid offers Linear Scalability. By creating a FlashSystem grid, users instantly enable scalability of not only performance, but also logical objects.
In addition, Policy-based Replication and High Availaibility, as well as Partition Migrations can be configured between any of the members of the grid.
The benefits of IBM FlashSystem grid are quantifiable:
- 2x more capacity – unlock more capacity for data growth or safeguarded backups.
- 40% less effort – industry-leading automation minimises time spent on planning, provisioning, and data mobility.
- 100% availability – Virtualise your storage infrastructure so your data is always available – wherever you need it.
- Ready for the future – easily scale capacity and performance.
And customers can ensure their infrastructure continually stays modern thanks to regular hardware refreshes.
IBM FlashSystem Cyber Recovery Guarantee
Ransomware is one of the most disruptive threats to modern businesses. Being able to recover your data and applications quickly and easily should be a priority and the first line of defence – not the last.
IBM FlashSystem now includes a Cyber Recovery Guarantee that helps customers prepare for the impact of a cyberattack by safeguarding data and ensuring the recovery of a Safeguarded Copy of business-critical applications and data in 60 seconds or less.
The IBM FlashSystem itself is cyber resilient, and the Safeguarded Copy immutable snapshot provides further data protection by enabling logical air gap for the data while allowing an on-array, fast recovery of the snapshot within 60 seconds – guaranteed.
Users can go back in a previous snapshot just before a cyber incident and make it available to quickly start the recovery process.
Meanwhile, a copy of the affected data can be preserved for a forensic analysis as the recovered data makes a clone of the volume.
IBM Expert Care Premium helps users to get started by providing a designated technical account manager (TAM). Then the team ensures the system is free of technical issues and is ready to perform a fast recovery during a cyber incident. IBM Expert Lab implements the IBM Safeguarded Copy and tests the recoverability of the immutable snapshot. The service also implements and verifies extensive cyber resiliency features including multi-factor authentication, two-person integrity, and role-based authentication to limit the attack surface to the system and data.
In the event of a cyber incident, IBM Expert Care and IBM Expert Lab are there to help – because every incident is different and requires a unique response.
If technical issues are encountered during a cyber incident, Expert Care will help with data recovery and exploring possible solutions to restore the immutable copies as quickly as possible.
In case the recovery takes longer than 60 seconds, IBM Expert Lab will be there to help customers get back on their feet.