IBM Announces New Flash Storage Solutions

Today, IBM announced the expansion of its flash storage solutions, with three new flash products. Geared toward cloud environments, the new offerings aim to assist users in quickly accessing and deriving value from Big Data for cloud-based applications and processes, and employ IBM MicroLatency technology, which seeks to quicken decision making by transferring data within the flash using hardware instead of additional software.

"There are massive increases in the quantity of data being generated in our user environment and, along with that, there are simultaneously increases in demand for more information to be received and delivered back in real time," says Woody Hutsell, manager of FlashSystem Portfolio Strategy at IBM Systems. "The storage solutions that our customers have been using for years are not necessarily properly equipped to handle the volume of data coming in and provide responses quickly enough to satisfy user demands. These new products are designed to help them respond as rapidly as possible, so we can continue to maintain the customer's attachment to our business."

The new products include the FlashSystem A9000, the FlashSystem A9000R, and the IBM DS8888. The FlashSystem A9000 comes fully configured and aims to give an easy entrance into flash storage for IT service providers and lower the cost of establishing an all-flash environment. The FlashSystem A9000R features grid architecture, giving cloud service providers a scalable storage solution that can be scaled up to the petabyte range.

Both the FlashSystem A9000 and the FlashSystem A9000R are equipped with data reduction features—such as pattern removal, deduplication, and real-time compression—and utilize IBM FlashCore Technology, to provide optimal performance. The IBM DS8888 is an all-flash solution for enterprise-class servers, designed to improve customer databases and accelerate data-intensive applications.

The new offerings complement IBM's existing flash storage solutions such as the FlashSystem V9000 and FlashSystem 900, both of which also utilize IBM FlashCore technology. The FlashSystem V9000 is designed for mixed workloads and features storage virtualization capabilities. The FlashSystem 900 is designed for high performance and employs a hardware-accelerated architecture.

IBM's flash portfolio represents more than 380 patents and also features solutions aimed at data management. For example, the IBM Hyper-Scale Manager is a multisystem management application that aims to streamline data movement and can manage large amounts of data from a single interface, reducing mouse clicks by more than 50 percent for greater efficiency.

"What we've all been witness to—especially over the last few years—has been a massive change in how businesses store their data. That change has been necessitated by the Internet of Things…but it's enabled by flash storage technology," Hutsell says. "Increasingly, we think of flash as being ubiquitous: It's needed in every environment, it's needed to support our servers, it's needed to support the variety of storage solutions we bring to market…IBM has flash across its portfolio to enable our customers to meet these new challenging workloads, wherever they pop up." 

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