IBM Expands All-Flash Storage

Calling it the foundation of its cloud and cognitive computing strategy, IBM has significantly expanded its all-flash #storage platform portfolio with the announcement today of three new array products aimed at managing massive amounts of #data associated with cloud-based, high-performance workloads. Targeting hyperscale, cloud data centers and cloud service providers (CSP), the systems utilize IBM’s FlashSystem self-optimizing technology, boasting minimum latency of 250μs (microseconds).

“With the FlashSystem A9000 and FlashSystem A9000R, IBM has really set a new level of expectations for customers with performance and scale in a building block for cloud solutions,” said Randy Kerns, senior strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst company. “The importance of a mature solution cannot be underestimated. Customers now have a product that has the acceleration for applications using flash technology with a foundation of field-proven deployments. FlashSystem A9000 and FlashSystem A9000R are major steps forward for IBM in providing cloud storage solutions.”

The new systems are based on flash technology developed by Texas Memory Systems, which IBM acquired in 2012. For IBM, “all -flash means we don’t use traditional SSDs off the shelf, we use raw flash and create our own flash modules, our own flash core technology,” Eric Herzog, vice president of marketing for IBM storage systems, told EnterpriseTech. He said this gives IBM “unmatched” IOPS (up to 2 million) and latency performance, high durability (the new systems come with a seven-year guarantee on flash media), and high density, enabling more flash per rack for savings on power consumption and cooling.

Herzog said flash’s superior performance and moderating pricing have made it the fastest growing part of the storage market. “Flash is doing to hard drive arrays what hard drive arrays did to tape, and going back further, what tape did to punch cards,” he said. “You start as a niche and then it spreads. Probably in another 10 years there’ll be another storage media that replaces flash.”

He said the all-flash arrays are “cognitive in design and operation,” and include intelligent storage automation that enables data to move from flash to other storage media within an array, to another IBM array, to more than 300 non-IBM arrays or from a non-IBM array to a different non-IBM array. Moving data from tier-to-tier either within an array or to another array occurs by the storage system evaluating and learning data access usage patterns. Automated distribution of data helps to avoid “hot spots” (an area that has high activity and long wait times to transfer data) making information available for cognition when needed.

Curated from IBM Expands All-Flash Storage; Takes Aim at Cognitive Computing and Cloud