A Big Blue Cloud of Clouds

December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

IBM last week announced that is brainiacs in research have come up with new cloud storage software that provides a simple way to migrate data across multiple clouds, while keeping it confidential and secure.

According to IBM, companies want to move their applications to the cloud but are scared off by poor security and reliability, and the utterly horrifying specter of vendor lock-in. The solution, according to IBM, is its patent-pending “cloud of clouds” approach.

In the Big Blue cloud of clouds, organizations can “invoke the resilience of separate clouds to offer stronger protection against service outages and data loss than any single cloud can deliver,” IBM says.

IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou expands on that thought. “Our cloud-of-clouds invention can help clients avoid service outages and security incidents that impact the reliability and security of individual clouds,” he says in a press announcement published last week. “We are adding multiple levels of redundancy and reliability by making cloud migration and backup easier and faster than is currently possible.”

The secret sauce to this cloud-of-cloud approach resides in the vicinity of such cutting edge technologies as object storage and key-value stores. There is a patent-pending algorithm involved, and there is a toolkit that’s currently available for Alpha testing by brave souls. IBM’s Storwize SAN technology is also involved.

And then of course, there is SoftLayer, IBM’s proud cloud participator. “SoftLayer … is the default storage provider and it provides the robust object-based interface,” IBM says. “The combination of the toolkit and SoftLayer enables clients to overcome limits in their cloud storage capacity by dynamically routing to an alternative storage system–such as easily migrating from a remote public-cloud to on-premise private-cloud-optimizing the overall efficiency of data storage management.”

So much for avoiding vendor lock-in in its entirety. But this is IBM, after all.