IBM unveiled a new storage software portfolio on Tuesday. The company also announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in its storage software portfolio over the next five years. The investment will focus on R&D of new cloud storage software, object storage and open standard technologies including OpenStack.

IBM says it is working on an accelerated roadmap to extract intelligence from its traditional storage hardware products, which will let clients to use it in any form – as-a-service, as an appliance, or, as software. Its Spectrum Storage incorporates more than 700 patents, and can manage massive amounts of data from a single dashboard, according to the company, while Spectrum Accelerate is the first software product that the company has based on the software from its XIV high-end storage appliance. Building off an IBM Research invention, IBM plans to introduce a multi-cloud connecter as a software feature in IBM Spectrum Storage.3 later this year.

[Image courtesy: IBM]