IBM announced a slew of updates to Spectrum, its software-defined storage (SD-storage) line. The new capabilities will make it easier for companies to derive value from the massive amounts of data they are storing — for example, from analytics and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven workloads across multicloud environments, according to IBM.

“Data is essentially today’s oil,” said Eric Herzog, chief marketing officer for IBM's storage division and VP of its global channel sales. “And the infrastructure people are using to run that data is multicloud.”

The company added file storage to its SD-storage lineup with Spectrum NAS. This new product targets enterprise workloads that currently run on traditional network-attached storage (NAS) servers.

Companies can deploy the software-only product on bare-metal servers or virtual machines (VMs). And because it’s software-defined, and thus scalable by adding nodes, it lowers storage costs, IBM claims.

“It’s a great product for high-end, big-data analytics,” Herzog said, adding that the “biggest banks in the world” are customers.

IBM also updated Spectrum Protect Plus, its data protection product for virtual environments. It improved database support and added faster restores for Oracle and SQL databases. IBM will also offer Spectrum Protect Plus as a cloud-based service on IBM Cloud. This includes automated data protection and provisioning for VMware in IBM Cloud.

While IBM Cloud is (unsurprisingly) the first cloud provider to offer this SD-storage product as a cloud-based service, Herzog said it won’t be the only one for very long. “Don’t be surprised later when we talk about all kinds of other cloud providers offering IBM Spectrum Protect Plus on their clouds,” he said.

IBM added new drive configurations to its Cloud Object Storage for unstructured data. The product now supports 12 terabyte drive configurations, which means it supports larger storage capacities per node.

Additionally, the company today announced new capacities to its all-flash storage arrays. The hyper-scale mobility software now enables migration from IBM's XIV Gen3 disk storage server systems to its all-flash FlashSystem A9000/R without application and workload disruption. And it added new NVMe over fabrics (NVMe-F) capabilities for IBM FlashSystem 900, IBM Spectrum Accelerate, and IBM Spectrum Virtualize products. This means all of IBM’s all-flash arrays now support the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol. The protocol lowers latency and improves speed in all-flash systems.