BOSTON, USA: IBM announced its foray into cloud storage space with the launch of IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud, IBM Information Archive and new consulting services. This announcement came at its Information Infrastructure Analyst Summit in Boston.

Traditional storage cloud solutions have piqued the interest of many enterprise clients for their very low price points, but these systems have mostly been limited to 'sandbox' use cases for secondary or tertiary copies of data or for use in development and test environments in which data does not have to be frequently accessed and does not tend to grow into large scales.

The IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud is a private cloud offering that utilises low cost components in a true scale-out clustered model not offered by its competition. The solution supports multiple petabytes of capacity, billions of files, and scale-out performance previously limited to the largest 'high performance computing' systems.

Technologies such as IBM's General Parallel File System have been combined with the latest advances in storage, virtualization and server technologies like XIV and BladeCenter to provide performance and scalability all under one globally addressable namespace.

The solution is highly secure and built to make use of a client's existing security and authentication infrastructure. In addition to this, IBM offers tightly coupled services for implementation support and an optional ongoing lightweight managed service to help clients manage their cloud environment on an ongoing basis.

IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud is the first of IBM's cloud-based storage solution, built to be implemented either on the client premise or as part of its strategic outsourcing capabilities. The company will continue to build out this area of the portfolio, including a business-grade public cloud for storage, which will be offered with flexible consumption models and a self-service user interface to fully abstract the technology from the end user.

In addition, IBM Global Business Services is adding three new cloud consulting offerings to its business and IT consulting portfolio. These new offerings provide flexible entry points based on client needs, and are priced and delivered for near-term ROI. They are designed to help clients who are looking for an end-to-end cloud business-based IT strategy or to help clients select the right cloud delivery model for their business.

Strategy and Change Services for Cloud Adoption - IBM consultants can help firms determine how to get started with cloud adoption by quickly identifying priority business areas; acknowledging key gaps in processes, technology, organization and governance; and evaluating the range of new cloud-based delivery models in order to develop a roadmap for piloting cloud.

IBM Strategy and Change Services for Cloud Providers - For firms looking to enter the cloud provider market, IBM can help define an in-depth roadmap that treats cloud as a new operating model rather than just a method of IT delivery -- an essential step in business model evolution.

IBM Testing Services for Cloud - IBM can also help companies build a business case that quantifies the cost, schedule and quality improvements associated with pursing a cloud application test environment. This can help reduce capital expenses by provisioning test servers on demand, decreasing the cost of test setup and tear-down and associated defects, while shortening overall cycle time.

In June of this year IBM unveiled its cross-company strategy to capture the enterprise cloud computing market, helping clients attack rising costs and complexity by workload. Since then many products and services from the portfolio have entered the market, including Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, which began its public beta on October 1, 2009.