Today IBM announced that it was expanding its all-flash portfolio with three new arrays, including an all-flash mainframe. IBM states that these new all-flash arrays (AFAs) will help accelerate the adoption of “cognitive solutions” and help customers extract value from data faster so it can be turned into competitive advantage. The new AFAs have new capabilities including self-optimizing technology and industry-leading minimum latency of 250μs (microsecond). The AFAs are aimed at high performance cloud-based applications and workloads.
Today IBM announced that it was expanding its all-flash portfolio with three new arrays, including an all-flash mainframe. IBM states that these new all-flash arrays (AFAs) will help accelerate the adoption of “cognitive solutions” and help customers extract value from data faster so it can be turned into competitive advantage. The new AFAs have new capabilities including self-optimizing technology and industry-leading minimum latency of 250μs (microsecond). The AFAs are aimed at high performance cloud-based applications and workloads.
The newly announced AFAs use the intelligent storage automation within IBM’s FlashSystem portfolio, giving customers the flexibility to move their data where it is needed within these arrays or more than 300 non-IBM arrays. The automatic tiering moves data around to the best tier or array by the evaluating and learning usage patterns about how often data is accessed. This helps needed data become available sooner. These new solutions were engineered with a close partnership with the IBM Cloud team to ensure they met the needs of Cloud Service Providers. The solutions also have cloud centric features built in such as quality-of-service that prevents the impact "noisy neighbor" problems have on application performance, secure multi-tenancy, thresholding, and easy-to-deploy grid scale out.
The announcement includes two new FlashSystems, the A9000 and A9000R, and the new all-flash mainframe, the DS8888. The A9000 is what IBM is calling a highly parallel all-flash storage for hyperscale and cloud data centers for the enterprise. The A9000 features a highly parallel grid architecture which reduces the management tasks involved in adding additional storage to cloud or cognitive applications. If new storage is added the A9000 transparently and automatically self-tunes the new configuration. The A9000 uses IBM’s new Hyper-Scale Manager (a simplified user interface that is designed to streamline data movement) that enables management for over 100 units from a single user interface. Hyper-Scale Manager also features Hyper-Scale Mobility a feature that enables non-disruptive migration of data between arrays.
The FlashSystem A9000R is the big brother to the A9000. The A9000R is an all-flash rack system designed for Cloud Service Providers and large enterprises that need to deliver cloud services with native quality of service and secure multi-tenancy, while easily scaling up to over a petabyte. The A9000R helps companies derive value form their data faster and provides all of the benefits of the A9000 in a rack configuration. Both of the FlashSystems feature FlashCore technology, all in house created software from IBM that provides grid architectures and data reduction, including pattern removal, deduplication and real-time compression with consistently low latency. Both of the systems can be priced as low as $1.50/GB.
IBM is also releasing the DS8888 and all-flash mainframe for organizations that are using IBM's enterprise-class servers, z Systems and Power Systems. The DS8888 will give customers 24x7x365 access to their data and applications while enabling faster decision making.
DS8888 key specifications:
- Shared SMP processor configuration: IBM POWER8 – dual 24 core /48 core
- Processor memory for cache and nonvolatile storage (minimum/maximum): 128GB to 2TB
- Host adapters (minimum/maximum):
- 2/8 host adapter pairs
- 4- and 8-port 8 Gbps, or 4-port 16 Gbps Fibre Channel/IBM FICON
- Host ports (minimum/maximum): 8 to 128
- Max capacity: 192TB (Flash cards)
- RAID levels: 5, 10
Availability
The FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R are available today. The DS8888 is expected to be available in June 2016.
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