IBM has announced that it will be shutting down its Swift-based Object Storage for IBM Spark as a Service, almost two years after its launch.
Despite the growth of cloud, the company has decided to shut down its first cloud object storage service with no specific explanation as to why.
The service, which was launched in February 2015, was only made private in February 2016 but IBM’s Rohan Vaidyanathan said in a statement: “We will now be deleting all existing instances after 30 days i.e. on August 24, 2017. We recommend users to unprovision the Object Storage v1 service and switching to v3, before August 24, 2017.”
Object storage rose in popularity this year amongst cloud providers, and clearly IBM is more focused on its most recent v3 server which it says will remain available for use.
According to a report from 451 Research, cloud providers have resorted to cutting prices of their object storage services to appeal to a wider customer reach.
Read more: Cloud wars: Object storage replaces VMs as new battleground for AWS, Google & Microsoft
In close connection, IBM rivals AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft all lowered prices in a short time period, to which 451 Research analyst, Jean Atelsek described as them “playing an aggressive game of tit for tat, cutting object storage prices to avoid standing out as expensive.”
In essence, IBM advises users of the Object Store v1 service to transfer all data and point Analytics for Apache Spark applications for use with the Object Storage v3 service.
