Apache CloudStack has become one of the leading IaaS cloud platforms in Brazil. It powers public cloud providers, private enterprise clouds, and large-scale academic environments. This trend accelerated after VMware’s licensing changes following its acquisition by Broadcom, which pushed providers and enterprises toward an open platform with no licensing costs. Demand for data sovereignty and LGPD compliance (Brazil’s data protection law) has also played a role, favoring clouds operated within the country.
Within the customer base of PSA Soluções em TI alone, more than 20 organizations run CloudStack in production, with a diverse profile. They include large enterprises such as PicPay, a Nasdaq-listed digital bank with over 70 million customers, and T-Systems do Brasil, part of the Deutsche Telekom group. They include public research institutions such as Embrapa, Unicamp, and RNP (Brazil’s National Research and Education Network). And they include a broad network of cloud and data center providers such as EVEO, Under, HostDime, Century, Skynova, Arlequim, Opus Tech, Adentro, Brasil Cloud, Constel, and Contato Telecom. Beyond our own base, public references such as the University of São Paulo (USP), Globo.com, Locaweb, and Ascenty confirm the platform’s relevance in the country.
These environments rely on enterprise storage for what matters most: virtual machine volumes, databases, backup, and disaster recovery. Yet today only about 10% of these customers use IBM storage. The main reason is neither technical nor price. It is the lack of integration.
CloudStack already offers native managed storage plugins for competitors such as Dell PowerFlex, NetApp SolidFire, HPE, Pure Storage, StorPool, and Linstor. With them, providers create, map, snapshot, and replicate volumes directly from the platform, automatically and with visibility for each tenant. Without an equivalent plugin, anyone who chooses IBM FlashSystem or IBM Storage Scale must work with generic LUNs and custom scripts, with no official support. In practice, this rules IBM out of the buying decision before the technical evaluation even begins.
Native integration would change this in three areas:
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Block (FlashSystem / Storage Virtualize): direct per-volume mapping, snapshots and clones orchestrated by CloudStack, QoS tied to disk offerings, replication for DR, and Safeguarded Copy for ransomware protection, which is one of providers’ top concerns today.
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File (Storage Scale): shared primary storage, fileset snapshots, per-tenant quotas, replication via AFM, and secondary and object (S3) storage for templates and backups.
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Market: immediate access to an installed base that is choosing storage right now, during its migration away from VMware. The 90% currently using other solutions become a real opportunity for displacement and expansion.
IBM already has the technical capabilities this market is looking for: performance, data efficiency, immutability, and replication. What is missing is the connection to the platform these customers use every day. An official plugin, maintained and supported by IBM, would put the storage portfolio on equal footing with the competition and position IBM as the reference for sovereign clouds and service providers in Brazil and Latin America.
