IBM Flash Storage Family Gains Faster, Agile Editions

IBM’s latest flash storage array systems are all about refreshing the entry space to help make enterprise-class storage accessible to businesses of all sizes and needs The entry-level storage family now features IBM FlashSystem 5015 and 5035, which have been refreshed from their predecessors 5010 and 5030 respectively, and the new wholly new designed 5200. IBM’s latest flash storage array systems are all about refreshing the entry space to help make enterprise-class storage accessible to businesses of all sizes and needs The entry-level storage family now features IBM FlashSystem 5015 and 5035, which have been refreshed from their predecessors 5010 and 5030 respectively, and the new wholly new designed 5200. In addition to the new FlashSystem models, IBM announced it will add support for IBM Cloud Satellite to the FlashSystem portfolio. This launch extends the work IBM started nearly a year ago to the day when the company reorganized its storage array lineup and consolidated the old Storwize arrays into the FlashSystem line. This was an attempt to not only simplify naming conventions, but also to reduce technical complexity for customers.  “Ease of use is not just a Herzog’s cigar store story, it’s a story for the global enterprises,” said Eric Herzog, VP of product marketing and management for IBM Storage Systems. He compared the IT layoffs during the last economic downturn in 2007-2009 to what the industry has seen as result of the pandemic. “But when you open up the envelope of IT headcount, the number of server, storage, and network admins is basically like it was after all those big layoffs in 2007-2009,” Herzog said.  Now in the face of a looming recession, storage administrators from small to midsized business (SMBs) as well as global enterprises have to manage more under constrained budgets with reduced staffing. “Enterprises as well as the small shops are saying things. Ease of use is important,” Herzog said. The new IBM FlashSystem 5200 supports IBM FlashCore Modules, Intel and Samsung Storage-Class Memory drives, and industry-standard NVMe flash drives for hybrid environments, including those in Red Hat OpenShift, container storage interface (CSI) for Kubernetes, Ansible automation, and Kubernetes, as well as VMware and bare metal environments. The 5200 model can store up to 1.7 petabytes (PB) in a one-unit array and boasts as much as 21 GB/s from a bandwidth standpoint with up to 1.5 million IOPS per system and latency as low as 70 microseconds, the company claims. It also comes at 20% of the cost of its predecessor, the 5100. Data resiliency functions as IBM HyperSwap support automatic failover in case of a site incident. The goal is to deliver more work with fewer drives and lower cost by consolidating and managing storage as if it were one pool, Herzog explained. The new FlashSystem array comes with Storage Insights and Spectrum Virtualize software built in. The former includes cloud-delivered artificial intelligence-based predictive analytics, storage resource management, and a support platform. Spectrum Virtualize started as IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), an appliance designed to abstract the myriad complexities of disparate storage vendors to provide a single presentation for host systems. It simplifies processes with a common interface for IBM Storage products from entry level to enterprise as well as for other vendors virtualized behind Spectrum Virtualize. These processes include advanced functions such as encryption, autonomic data placement, compression, deduplication, point in time copies, and replication. “We’ve dropped the price to the field, as well as give you edge use cases for the data center, particularly a very strong migration play from older arrays – and not just ours – as Spectrum Virtualize supports over 500 heterogeneous multi-vendor arrays,” Herzog said. Take for example, an older array that doesn’t have container support. By consolidating that data onto the  FlashSystem 5200, that same array can gain container support through the CSI spec, he explained. Combined, the software inside the device allows companies to migrate data from one physical array to another regardless of whether it’s an IBM device or storage from another vendor. IBM also announced plans to update IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud. This is software that enables clients to replicate or migrate data from heterogeneous storage systems between on-premises environments and IBM Cloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS). It will extend the same capabilities to Microsoft Azure starting with a beta program in the third quarter of 2021. IBM Cloud Satellite allows users to run their IBM Cloud service on-premises or in edge locations managed through a single pane of glass in the public cloud. It is slated to support the FlashSystem portfolio in March, the company said.  The platform uses IBM’s Cloud as a base and includes IBM Cloud Observability to provide a centralized view of clusters and the services running in those clusters. Running on top of that base is a control plane that is designed to abstract away the operational details into a single management layer. That abstracted management is based on Red Hat’s Kubernetes-focused OpenShift platform that allows IBM to be flexible as to which infrastructure it can run the Cloud Satellite platform on. “Think of Cloud Satellite like Amazon Outposts,” Herzog explained. “With Amazon Outposts, when you want to go hybrid on-premises, of course, you have to use the Outposts appliance. With Cloud Satellite, the IBM Cloud division has created a template that sits in the software stack and allows IBM FlashSystem and IBM SAN Volume Controller for hybrid cloud configurations to leverage the installed base of infrastructure without needing to buy a new appliance, which you would have to do with Outposts.” In other words, the templating infrastructure can connect arrays that are managed under Spectrum Virtualized on a flash system, whether they’re IBM’s or a competitors, to Cloud Satellite.