IBM COS - the ultimate storage disruptor
March 27, 2020

IBM COS - the ultimate storage disruptor

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Object Storage

I'm part of my organization's IBM practice and we provide consulting services to our client on usage and fitment of IBM products based on the industry they belong to and the problem they want to solve.
We usually deal with cloud products but also have high expertise within core IBM products category as well. I'm currently exploring using COS along with IBM Watson Studio to create analytic solutions for my client.
  • Working with large data.
  • Search indexing.
  • Free service data limit.
  • File format support beyond CSV.
  • External datasource OOTB support for packaged vendors.
  • Faster time to market.
  • Faster journey to cloud proposition.
  • Scalability and elasticity helps for larger clients.
  • get_result(jobId, pagenumber=None) returns SQL result data frame for entire result or for specified page of results.
  • list_results(jobId) returns a data frame with the list of result objects written.
  • list_cos_objects(cos_url) returns a data frame with the list of objects found in the given cos u.
For our client it is really important to know data migration capabilities of the product. Since IBM COS integrates seamlessly with IBM Aspera it provides us flexibility to discuss with the client their on-premise, between cloud data centers and between on-prem and vendor data centers migration requirements which leads to better cost management for our clients and also custom solution.
It does help during consulting to have these options available from IBM COS. We work with clients who have a really data centric business which means the cost increases for using a cloud product like COS for data storage. However, because of these multiple data storage class tiers it becomes easier to provide a sustainable business solution to our customers which is not too expensive from cost perspective and at the same time provides scalable solutions when necessary.
Primarily we are an IBM practice, hence the focus is on COS. But since we need to prove COS is better than other products in the market we need to evaluate other products as well. I've looked at Alibaba COS and Oracle COS and similar products. In some evaluations like below, IBM COS provides an edge over others:
  1. Security along with IBM Credentials bucket solution.
  2. It supports OpenStack Swift & Amazon S3.
  3. IBM has a good reputation when it comes to enterprise grade operational services delivery.

  • IBM Cloud Foundry
  • IBM Cloud Functions
  • IBM Streaming Analytics
  • IBM Analytics Engine
  • IBM Watson Assistant
  • IBM Watson Tone Analyzer
  • IBM Watson Knowledge Studio
We are an IBM workshop, so we depend completely on IBM products to provide valuable solutions to our client. Since before cloud, IBM has been a leader in integration space and is right now heading towards leading the AI race. As a practice we do see a lot of potential in IBM cloud solutions which are increasingly maturing and providing enterprise-grade services along with support to IBM Openshift containerized solutions.
Well suited for:
  • Dashboards
  • Aggregated data and text key-based search indexing
  • Where you need to pay as you go and don't have a huge data requirement
  • As a free data storage service for faster time to market services like dashboards and data refinement flows
  • Non RDBMS related requirements

IBM Cloud Object Storage Feature Ratings

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
10
Dynamic scaling
10
Elastic load balancing
10
Monitoring tools
7
Security controls
10