IBM has been busy imbuing AI-inspired “cognitive” capabilities into its cloud offerings and today those efforts have turned to its enterprise storage business.
The company today announced its new DeepFlash Elastic Storage Server system, which offers up to 360 TB of all-flash capacity including big data analytics, Internet of Things management and other workloads that require high-performance access to storage. By IBM’s estimates, the system offers an 8x performance improvement over hard-disk systems for analytics workloads. By employing IBM Spectrum Scale, or the company’s General Parallel File System (GPFS), it offers unified file and object storage management and support for the big data-friendly Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS).
Also new is an expansion unit and new flash drives (7TB and 15TB) that enable IBM Storwize systems to scale up to 32 petabytes (PB) of capacity into four racks. On the cloud front, new updates to IBM Spectrum Virtualize adds hybrid-cloud block storage capabilities to the company’s on-premises storage systems.
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is a component of the government cloud storage offering from Unisys, the company announced today.
“Backed by IBM storage solutions today Unisys has built its own block storage cloud for federal government clients. With this solution, Unisys delivers distinct and reliable gold, silver and bronze tiers of performance in a multi-tenant, software-defined storage cloud,” said IBM in a media advisory.
New flash storage options for IBM’s high end DS8880 storage system helps double the performance of critical business applications running on the company’s IBM z Systems mainframes and Power Systems. Finally, to help drive the development of intelligent, cloud-native apps, IBM has added the ability to sync object and file data across both on-premises and cloud storage.
“Data feeds the engine for cognitive applications that deliver client value and competitive advantage. Helping clients evolve from having data obligations to using its data to better serve its business is at the heart of today’s wide-reaching announcement,” said Ed Walsh, general manager of IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure, in a statement. “Hybrid Cloud enablement, as a standard feature for new and existing users of Spectrum Virtualize gives our clients more control to store their data where it can have the most impact to its business.”
DeepFlash Elastic Storage Server, the Storwize expansion units, the new DS8880 flash storage options and updates to Spectrum Virtualize and Spectrum Scale will be available in early December.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
