Three of Storage Made Easy's products have been certified through IBM’s Ready for IBM Cloud ISV Technical Validation Program:
SME’s Enterprise File Fabric™,
S3 Explorer and
S3 Drive.
In order to certify these products, functional and performance testing was performed at IBM labs with IBM Cloud Object Storage in three scenarios – private, public and hybrid – with the simulated workload of a 10,000-user organisation.
As these products are designed to support organisations dealing with the movement of extremely large files, testing was also performed with M-Stream™ File Transfer Acceleration. M-Stream™, a capability of the Enterprise File Fabric™ platform, splits files into parts that are streamed in parallel from one storage server to another. It dramatically speeds up uploads, downloads and server-to-server copying of objects.
Testing was performed between IBM Cloud Object Storage instances on private and public clouds and was shown to maximise network bandwidth for the transfer of single files. During this testing, the Enterprise File Fabric platform could sustain a network utilisation of 500-600MBps (4-5Gbps) with eight concurrent users simultaneously uploading and downloading large files against IBM Cloud Object Storage.
The Enterprise File Fabric data management and protection platform unifies filesystems and object storage such as IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) into a single, easily-managed infrastructure in which data content is fully searchable and in which rules can be set to discover and classify data, including PII data. Organisations then use the File Fabric to enable workgroup collaboration, file sharing and synchronisation through a suite of desktop, mobile and web applications.
The solution supports object storage particularly well, enabling end users and legacy applications to interact with IBM COS through the File Fabric as if it was a regular file system. Businesses are able to monitor, secure and audit company and employee data silos, be they be on premise, on the cloud, in file systems, in object storage or in applications.
The S3 Explorer desktop application allows users to interact with object storage through a familiar file explorer-like interface. From the menu, or using drag and drop, users can easily upload, download and delete files and folders. Copying, moving and renaming objects and folders is also supported. Objects can be quickly located through search, and sensitive data is automatically encrypted on upload.
The S3 Drive enables users to mount and interact with Amazon S3 Compatible object storage as a local disk. Users can browse and open remote files with their favorite desktop, applications including the Microsoft Office Suite. File Explorer can be used to copy, move and rename S3 objects as if they were files and folders.
SME’s Enterprise File Fabric, S3 Explorer and S3 Drive all work with IBM’s product cloud object storage, and this new certification validates that they can be configured together to offer an effective cloud solution – whether a company is using a private, public or hybrid environment.
Jim Liddle, Storage Made Easy CEO, said: “This certification with IBM Ready for IBM Cloud adds confidence for enterprises deploying SME’s products in demanding environments with thousands of users and provides them a cost effective solution that delivers real return on investment.”
This certification provides a reference blueprint for configuring IBM COS and SME’s Enterprise File Fabric for high availability and performance in private, public and hybrid clouds.
