IBM took the wraps off a new series of software-defined cloud-based storage products with the same technology that powered Watson, a robot created by IBM that went on to win $1 million against two veterans in Jeopardy.
Dubbed Elastic Storage, the technology that enabled Watson to process a virtual encyclopedia of 200 million pages and 4 terabytes of content before buzzing in ahead of its two opponents in the Emmy-award winning game show. This same technology makes use of storage and memory to allow organizations to manage and access data in its storage systems from multiple locations. It uses virtualization to split storage arrays into a collective resource that can be split into virtual systems to suit the organization's needs.
IBM says Elastic Storage is capable of scanning 10 billion files in 43 minutes and can move billions of files in microseconds. It can also automatically transfer less frequently used data across the whole capacity pool into less expensive storage options, leaving faster storage resources, such as Flash for more important data. IBM claims this can cut down storage costs by as much as 90%.
"With huge advancement in data analytics, winners and losers will be determined by how fast organizations can act on data insights. In the era of Big Data and analytics, IBM believes it is critical to accelerate reliable data access while dramatically reducing its cost," says IBM spokesperson Sudipta Datta on the IBM blog.
Elastic Storage is available as a SoftLayer service. It supports OpenStack access to allow users to manage and access data across public and private clouds. It can also work with other application programming interfaces for Hadoop and other similar tools. Elastic Storage will also be available as a cloud service on IBM's SoftLayer IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) later in the year.
After Watson's landslide win against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, who each won a paltry $300,000 and $200,000 respectively compared to Watson's million-dollar prize, IBM started receiving calls from members of the healthcare industry who said they were interested in using Elastic Storage to store and process complex and voluminous medical data.
The company currently has a number of pilot centers for the medical application of Elastic Storage, one at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and another at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Treatment Center in Texas.
"Healthcare wasn't the first (application) I thought of. What was interesting was the doctors actually saw something in it that intrigued them," Watson team lead Mike Rhodin told the Washington Post in an interview.
In addition to hospitals, IBM is also marketing the technology to federal agencies and retailers.
