IBM’s latest software-defined storage product targets data protection for virtual machines.

Spectrum Protect Plus uses snapshot technology to provide backup, recovery, and data management in virtual environments. The agentless software also provides data clone functionality to support and automate DevOps workflows.

And it has data protection and monitoring based upon automated Service Level Agreements to provide backup status and support data retention regulations.

“Spectrum Protect Plus is a new product with a new architecture that provides backup the way virtual machine administrators and backup administrators need to work,” said Doug O'Flaherty, program manager for IBM Spectrum Solutions. “It’s agentless so it deploys inside of minutes, and comes preconfigured with a point and click UI [user-interface] for someone who’s not a backup administrator.”

It also has a Google-like search function for data access and recovery.

The new software works with VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. While the initial release focuses on VM environments, “we expect to blur the edges a bit as we move forward,” O'Flaherty said.

Companies have two different deployment options for the new product. It can run as standalone software installed into virtualized environments. Or it can be integrated with Spectrum Protect software — IBM’s enterprise-grade data protection software portfolio that can run in on-premises data centers as well as public and private clouds.

Integration with Spectrum Protect also provides a single view of the backup and recovery status across the data portfolio.

“It acts as a front end to the Spectrum Protect enterprise backup solution so enterprises that want a common view of multiple clouds have that power, too,” O'Flaherty said. “Spectrum Protect Plus is more than just a backup tool. It’s a data availability product. You can use it as an administrative tool to do provisioning, deployment as needed.”

IBM’s latest storage product is part of a nearly three-year push to expand its software-defined storage portfolio. It started with the company consolidating products and renaming this portfolio Spectrum Storage.

“We focused over $1 billion investment into that portfolio,” O’Flaherty said. “The name change was more than just a change and go to market. It also represented a significant investment in where we thought storage was going, and giving customers a choice of running it as software, as an integrated IBM solution so you can buy a hardware box with it, or running it in the cloud.”

The Spectrum portfolio represents about 40 percent of IBM’s storage revenue, according to O’Flaherty.

IBM acquired object-storage startup Cleversafe in 2015 and based its IMB Cloud Object Storage on this technology.

IDC forecasts spending on software-defined storage will grow from about $7 billion this year to $9.1 billion in 2019. The analyst firm ranks IMB as one of the top three SD-storage vendors, alongside Dell-EMC and VMware.