In comparison with many of its previous announcements IBM’s storage division is making an impressive, yet easy to understand, announcement today. It’s launching the FlashSystem 5015, 5035 and 5200, replacing three products launched almost exactly a year ago. FlashSystem 5015 and 5035 are 2U rack-mounted devices with many (usually unique) enterprise-class functions fitting in neatly with IBM’s overall storage and hybrid multi-cloud and container strategies. In contrast, the FlashSystem 5200 gives a unique turn by providing high end performance, availability, capacity, and data resilience in a 1U form factor. As always, I was able to pick up the details ahead of time from Eric Herzog (the division’s CMO and SVP) and his team.
Three new FlashSystems
There are three new products launched today, each of which have a latency of 70μs, are 2U in height for the 5015 and 5035 and a unique 1U for the FlashSystem 5200, and are shipped with IBM Spectrum Virtualize and IBM Storage Insights software. In addition to its extensive set of enterprise-class data services, Spectrum Virtualize Distributed RAID 1 can improve performance up to 15% compared to DRAID-5, which is particularly useful for performance of arrays with fewer drives.. In particular:
- The FlashSystem 5015, which replaces the FlashSystem 5010. It has a minimum of 32GB cache, a maximum capacity of 12PB (using 30TB flash drives), a maximum speed of 400k IOPS, a throughput of 8.2GB/second; it uses SAS SSD drives or a mixture of these and SAS disk drives.
- The FlashSystem 5035 (replacing the FlashSystem 5030). It has a minimum of 64GB cache, a maximum capacity of 23PB in a single array (extensible to 32PB with 2 clustered together), 1.2M IOPS, 12.4GB/second throughput. It is identical to the FlashSystem 5015 in terms of its ability to mix SSD and disk drives.
- The FlashSystem 5200, which replaces the FlashSystem 5100. It is an end-to-end NVMe-based array with the first 1U form factor using IBM FlashCore modules. It has a cache memory of up to 512GB, has a maximum usable capacity of 32PB, 1.5M IOPS, 21GB/second throughput and can use Storage Class Memory (SCM). Seamless hybrid cloud and container integration are included and the 5200 is capable of 4-way clustering, increasing IOPS to 6M and 84GB/second bandwidth per cluster.
The split between entry and midrange models is now the ability to use SCM and NVMe drives; latency is now the same across the range. Most IBM FlashSystem models are exclusively sold through indirect distribution channels.
IBM Flash System models have a number of competitive advantages, including:
- Its standard support for Storage Class Memory (SCM), which is absent from all other arrays apart from Dell EMC’s PowerStore, where it can’t be mixed with other types of raw storage;
- The small number of minimum drives (2) – better than all apart from NetApp’s E2800;
- The 1U rack height of the FlashSystem 5200 – shorter than all others;
- Their ability to be upgraded in single drive increments – less than most others apart from Dell EMC’s Unity XT, PowerStore and NetApp’s E2800;
- Their wide support for NVMe drives in midrange and entry products, which is absent, or only available as an ‘either/or’ choice on a small number of other vendor’s arrays;
- A full set of enterprise class data services that come with Spectrum Virtualize and Storage Insights. In fact, on the FlashSystem 5200 with Spectrum Virtualize the enterprise class data services will support >500 heterogenous, multi-vendor arrays, as well as the IBM FlashSystem portfolio.
- “Six nines” high availability software on all FlashSystem offerings (that equates to statistically only 31.56 seconds of downtime in a fully 24x7x365 year).
Its decision to acquire Texas Memory Systems in 2013 and then to use its FlashCore modules at the heart of its entry (FlashSystem 5200), midrange (FlashSystem 7200) and high-end arrays (FlashSystem 9200 and 9200R) is also important in differentiating its approach.
Any vendor launching a new product can only be compared with its own and others already in the market of course, but over time IBM has maintained many of these significant design advantages over its rivals.
IBM’s arrays are designed to be used across all storage environments including on bare-metal servers, virtual machines, in containers such as Red Hat OpenShift and across hybrid-cloud infrastructures. They each come bundled with Spectrum Virtualize and Storage Insights and have a built-in data migration process from IBM and other suppliers’ products.
Associated announcements
Alongside the new arrays IBM is also announcing today:
- The addition of Microsoft Azure to its Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud offering (joining AWS and IBM Cloud) – planned availability in Q4 ’21 with a beta in Q3 ‘21;
- A new Storage Expert Care program (initially for just the FlashSystem 5200) including access to bug fixes, updates and new releases of Spectrum Virtualize, predictive alerts and automated ticket management;
- Support for IBM Cloud Satellite, newly announced by its Cloud division. Satellite is designed to allow customers to launch consistent and coherent applications running on public clouds, on premise infrastructure and at the edge;
- A new Spectrum Virtualize GUI to make it easier for customers to deploy 2- or 3-site high availability configurations using HyperSwap. IBM also announced Red Hat Ansible automation for HyperSwap.
It will be interesting to see how the storage division fares once IBM spins off its managed service business by the end of the year. The retention of its Technology Support Services (TSS) within the on going IBM will help it to maintain its own hardware and understand its competitors’ through its multi-vendor service activities. I hope it will allow customers to access necessary code fixes through third party maintainers as well, not least to extend protect product lives in the face of the effect manufacturing new machines has on climate change.
The highest performance, the simplest range, the most coherent strategy
The challenge for all storage systems suppliers is to design chasses which can accommodate the almost endless development of the types and capacities of raw storage drives and the evolving without becoming obsolete or underpowered within a reasonable number of years.
IBM is fitting leading-edge performance into 2U rack-mountable devices with the advanced functionality fitted ideally for its developing hybrid multi-cloud and industry platform activities. I’m also impressed with IBM’s simplification of its arrays into two ranges, the sophistication of its Spectrum software and the way it’s using both to address the (increasingly complex) way large organizations want to build solutions. Other suppliers tend to have more product lines (often through multiple acquisitions), numerous ‘point solutions’ defined tactically and less-focused strategies to address the technical future of enterprise computing.