Ahead of VMworld next week, IBM announced today that it is expanding its all-flash storage products. These new all-flash products will be in IBM’s Storwize family line and is aimed at all companies from small to large with an eye on primary storage for cloud or cognitive applications and workloads. IBM is also announcing its new migration program, “Flash In.” This program is designed for clients to easily transition to IBM storage solutions.
Ahead of VMworld next week, IBM announced today that it is expanding its all-flash storage products. These new all-flash products will be in IBM’s Storwize family line and is aimed at all companies from small to large with an eye on primary storage for cloud or cognitive applications and workloads. IBM is also announcing its new migration program, “Flash In.” This program is designed for clients to easily transition to IBM storage solutions.
By now most in the industry realize the performance benefits of flash. As the price continues to drop more and more vendors are adding in hybrid and all-flash devices to meet customer demands on performance. The two products IBM is announcing as all-flash today are its IBM Storwize V7000F and IBM Storwize 5030F. IBM claims that these new flash products can meet the needs across the wide breadth of primary storage applications, workload and use cases at cost effective price points.
IBM’s Storwize products are built off of IBM Spectrum Virtualize. This management software features real-time data compression, thin provisioning, and snapshotting across nearly 400 different storage arrays from a multitude of vendors, which goes a way toward improving storage efficiency. Others ways the software aids in simplifying management is through automatic tiering, migrating data from one storage array to another, providing secure data at rest encryption, and remotely replicating data for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes.
The two new Storwize products can be used for primary storage across the board but the build and design are geared toward to specific markets: The 5030F is aimed at entry-level companies with high-performance at affordable costs, and the V7000F is geared more for mid-range storage. Both are designed with the idea of brining enterprise-class availability and function to smaller markets with better performance through their all-flash nature, and requiring less time to provision and optimize systems. Aside from these benefits the V7000F also supports four times clustering for scale-out and scale-up growth to help organizations manage rapidly growing datasets.
Both of the new all-flash Storwize products are ideal for a variety of workloads including database management systems such as SQL Server and MySQL to digital media sources that include broadcast, real-time streaming, and video surveillance, and they can handle massive volumes of Internet of Things (IoT) data.
IBM has also added all-flash expansion shelf support for the V9000 allowing customers to use lower-cost SSD volumes with the V9000 or combine the two together with the V9000 flash acting as a tier.
Key specifications of Storwize 5030F
- Software: IBM Spectrum Virtualize software for 5030F
- User interface: Web-based GUI
- Dual controller
- Connectivity: 10Gb iSCSI and 1Gb iSCSI (optional: 16Gb FC, 12Gb SAS, 10Gb iSCSI/FCoE, 1Gb iSCSI)
- Cache per system: 32Gb or 64GB
- Maximum drives supported: 504 drives per system with 20 expansion enclosures and 1,008 drives in two-way clustered:
- Small form-factor enclosure: 24 x 2.5” drives
- Large form-factor enclosure: 2 x 3.5” drives
Key specifications of Storwize V7000
- Host interface:
- SAN-attached 16 Gbps Fibre Channel, 1 Gbps iSCSI and optional 10 Gbps iSCSI/FCoE
- NAS-attached 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet
- User interface: Graphical user interface (GUI)
- Supported drives
- 3.5-inch disk drives:
- 3 TB, 4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB 7.2k nearline SAS disk
- 2.5-inch disk drives:
- 300 GB 15k SAS disk
- 600 GB 15k SAS drive
- 600 GB, 900 GB, 1.2 TB, and 1.8 TB 10k SAS disk
- 2 TB 7.2k nearline SAS disk
- 2.5-inch flash drives
- 200 GB, 400 GB, 800 GB, 1.6 TB, 1.92 TB, 3.2 TB and 3.84 TB
- 3.5-inch disk drives:
- RAID levels: RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, Distributed
- Maximum drives supported: 504 per control enclosure; 1,056 per clustered system
- Fans and power supplies: Fully redundant, hot-swappable
- Rack support: Standard 19-inch
- Management software:
- IBM Spectrum Virtualize software.
- IBM Spectrum Scale for Storwize V7000 Unified
- Cores per controller/control enclosure/clustered system: 10/20/80
- Cache per controller/control enclosure/clustered system: 32 or 64GB/64 or 128GB/up to 512GB
Not every customer likes the idea of mergers and acquisitions. The biggest one coming up with ample coverage over the past year or so is the Dell and EMC acquisition for $67 billion. IBM is betting that some customers will be concerned how the acquisition will shake out so they have introduced their “Flash In” migration program. This no-cost migration initiative will enable clients to migration off of Dell/EMC products onto IBM flash products such as the two announced above. IBM states that it is offering data migration and installation services for five consecutive days for either on-site replacement or upgrades.
Availability and pricing
The new IBM Storwize storage solutions are expected to be available from IBM and through IBM Business Partners this September. Pricing begins at $19,000.
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