Everything You Need to Know about IBM's New Backup Product, Spectrum Protect Plus. 

Spectrum Protect Plus is designed to be simple, quick to install and easy to use for 100% virtualised environments. VMware, Hyper V and a mixture of the two are supported. 

Spectrum Protect Plus is deployed as an OVF file and does not require any agents. You simply install the OVF file and give it an IP address. Then you can log in to the web based GUI and connect it to your vCentre instance. 

Features
Spectrum Protect Plus includes the sorts of features you expect in a modern backup product: 

• Application aware snapshots of Oracle and SQL databases.  (Physical and Virtual)
• Self-service restore portal
• Dedupe and Compression​
• Incremental Forever
• Full API

Setting up Backups
All backups are managed as SNAPs so data restore is quick and painless. Snapshots are done at the VMware level so any storage provisioned to VMware is supported. 

Backup frequency and retention is determined via policies. New VM's added to the cluster automatically get added to the default policy and backed up. 

Self Service Restore:
Users have the ability to restore individual files. Admins have the ability to globally search and restore files, VM's, VM templates, datastores and vApps. 

Cloud Deployment
Spectrum Protect Plus can also be deployed in the IBM Cloud for hybrid-cloud backup scenarios. 

For example: 

• You can connect to your on-premise vCentre instance and store the backups in the cloud
• You can connect to your cloud vCentre instance and store backups on premise

You can use your existing Spectrum Protect Plus licenses to deploy in the IBM cloud. There is also an automated deployment option that you can read more about here.

FAQ: 
Q: What VMware versions are supported? 
A: vSphere 5.5, 6.0, or 6.5 or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016

​Got a question? Post it in the comments so I can update the FAQ. ​​

Everything you need to know about IBM's new NAS product, Spectrum NAS. 

Architecture: 
Spectrum NAS is a software stack that turns commodity servers into a scale-out NAS. Every server has the same role in the cluster, performance and capacity are scaled out by adding more servers. 

Each node has a file system layer that handles concurrent NFS and CIFS access, writes are cached in RAM / NVMe / SSD before being converted to objects and then distributed across the nodes. 

Load balancing is performed using round robin DNS for smaller clusters. For larger clusters a more sophisticated F5 type solution is recommended. 

The sorts of things you'd expect from an enterprise NAS. Tiering, snapshots, replication, antivirus support, AD, LDAP...

Setup is quick and straightforward. 

I was able to quickly setup nodes by downloading the bootable ISO. Install was quick and the only config item to choose is the optional Mellanox driver installation. 

Once the nodes were finished, I installed the management software in Windows (meh, no other option sorry). This auto detected the nodes and from there you assign the networking parameters and setup the file system. 

I will post a video of the setup soon. 

All functions are handled via GUI and there is a complete API.

Want to give this a crack yourself? Download the 60 day trial here: 

Hardware support is largely a testing statement. The software is designed to run on almost any x86 server, with the considerations for Network, HBA and Cache. 

Network:
Must be 10Gbe (naturally), MUST support IGMP multicast. 

HBA: 
Any LSI card as long as it is 12Gb or above, drives must be 12Gb or above also. 

Cache: 
Performance tends to be better with two smaller cards vs. one larger card. Must be enterprise grade with endurance (DWPD) of 5 or above, close to 10 recommended. 

Bare minimum server specs are: 4x Cores, 12GB RAM, Boot: 20GB
​Must have 4x nodes to form a cluster. 

Performance testing is looking very impressive with 4x servers getting around 3.5GB/sec read and 1.5GB/sec write.

Read: 3.8GB/s NFSv4, 3.35GB/s SMBv2+v3 mixed. 
Write: 1.6GB/s NFSv4, 1.5GB/s SMBv2+v3 mixed.

Config: 4x servers, ea with 24x 10k drives and 2x NVMe 1.6TB cards.

No questions yet, post your questions in the comments.