IBM is making some big changes to its storage portfolio — but it could be OK, so long as you have a memory for names

In a bid to simplify its product range for customers, IBM has announced changes to the names of some of its popular storage solutions.

The tech giant’s latest product rebrand is designed to better communicate their functions and capabilities, and do away with some of the confusion that came about following the previous renaming round.

Back in 2015, Big Blue introduced the Spectrum prefix for its storage products. However, in February 2023, the Spectrum prefix was changed to Storage. This move was intended to make it clearer to customers what each product does. So, for example, the “Spectrum Fusion” product set became “Storage Fusion” instead.

Not ‘Storage Discover’

Now, Blocks and Files reports that IBM is renaming its Storage Fusion HCI product to Fusion HCI. This change was reportedly made to better reflect the product’s function as a hyperconverged system for running Red Hat OpenShift and its applications, rather than a storage product.

Additionally, the Spectrum Discover product, which provides data cataloging and metadata management for file and object data, has been given an alternative name. Blocks and Files says Big Blue’s customers can now refer to it as either Data Cataloging or Spectrum Discover, but not, as you might think given the previous prefix change, Storage Discover. Clear?

IBM’s Data Cataloging/Spectrum Discover product is designed to automatically catalog unstructured data by capturing metadata as it is created. It can connect to exabyte-scale heterogeneous file, object, backup, and archive storage on premises and in the cloud, making it a valuable tool for data management.

While the new names may take some getting used to, the underlying functionality of IBM’s revamped storage portfolio remains the same, and the changes are sensible ones that better define the products’ purposes.