In Q1 IBM’s storage announcements mainly concerned software; in Q2, flash storage systems; and this time round they’re about both and more. As before I had a chance to talk with Eric Herzog, CMO of the storage division ahead of time in order to bring you this analysis of today’s launch.
I’m very impressed with the continued and keen focus IBM puts on maintaining a relevant, coherent set of offerings despite this being such a comprehensive announcement that it’s hard to keep on top of the detail. It goes further than most of its competitors in fitting its products to new uses – whether as part of an infrastructure for autonomous self-driven vehicles, the use of tape backup by large public cloud suppliers, or the support for the use of hybrid applications spread across on-premise systems, public and private clouds.
Storage hardware – new ‘Gen3’ V7000 and lots of NVMe enhancements
Source: ITCandor, 2018
I’ve shown all of IBM’s storage system offerings in the Figure above, with new and enhanced products shown in bold.
Today IBM:
- Launches the ‘Gen3’ Storwize V7000 midrange array, improving on the previous version by adding NVMe internal to the array, its 2.5” NVMe FlashCore modules (we discussed last quarter), and NVMe over Fibre channel fabric support as well. Data throughput is up to 2.5 times better than the previous models and has been built to fit into NVME over Fibre Channel (NVMEoFC) SAN configurations. The new design also allows users to install ‘commodity’ solid state drives alongside IBM’s flash modules. The system supports a maximum of 8 of the new 5U expansion or up to 20 of the 2U expansions (or a combination) to accommodate 2.5” and 3.5” SAS flash and/or disk drives – adding up to a maximum of 760 drives in one system for its richest/most space conscious users. Up to four systems may be clustered together for scalability and the new system may be clustered with the previous generation for investment protection too. The inbuilt Easy Tier software automatically moves and places data across arrays – not just in V7000 systems, but also across other non-IBM products such as Dell EMC’s Unify and HPE storage systems (when attached to a Storwize V7000). IBM has decided that from now on this and all Storwize family members will be sold and delivered exclusively through indirect distribution channels, which the IBM/Cisco co-developed VersaStack converged infrastructure system already is.
- Enhances its FlashSystem 900 flash array, reducing its write latency by 15% to 85ms and fitting it to NVMeoFC SANs. A new MicroLatency Module extends its effective maximum capacity to 440TB with a 40% lower $/TB price.
- Is doubling the flash capacity of its mainframe DS8880F arrays with a new 15.4TB flash card, allowing a maximum capacity of 8PB in a single physical space. This array uses IBM’s zHyperLink connections to its mainframes with much lower data write latency than high performance FICON configurations.
- Launches the new TS1160 tape drive, which has doubled the native capacity to 20TB per tape; this supports Write Once, Read Many times (WORM) cartridges and can read and write TS1150 formats; although it can only read the older TS1140 ones. The native data rates of the new drive have been improved by 11% to 400MB/sec. It is also enhancing its TS3500 and TS4500 tape libraries by incorporating these new drives.
- Introduces new GLxC Elastic Storage Server 5.3.2 models, which use denser enclosures to increase maximum capacity and/or reduce the number of racks needed. Upgrading capacity in these systems can be done without interrupting applications and the inbuilt software automatically rebalances data across the upgraded configuration.
The new V7000 has been added to the 440 other (IBM and competitor’s) arrays which can be managed by Spectrum Virtualize and its SVC appliance, which has been extended for us in NVMEoFC SAN configurations and can be installed as a non-disruptive software upgrade (which is applicable to any of its arrays purchased after September 2016). It plans to extend Spectrum Virtualize for NVMe over Ethernet (NVMEoE) configurations in 2019.
IBM has now incorporated NVMe drives in almost all of its array families apart from the DS8800, which it will almost certainly do in future.
Storage software Q3 2018 – Spectrum Discover launched, other offerings enhanced
Source: ITCandor, 2018
I’ve shown all of IBM’s storage software offerings in the Figure above, with new and enhanced products shown in bold.
IBM is currently second only to Dell EMC as a supplier of storage hardware and data management software. Today it launches new products and features of its portfolio. In particular:
- Spectrum Discover – its new software offering uses meta-data (data about classes of the underlying data) to speed up automatic cataloguing of unstructured data and enable deep insights into all information by adding data tags – both of which are done at tremendous speed. The software supports IBM’s Cloud Object Storage and Spectrum Scale and IBM also intends to extend Spectrum Discover to include Dell EMC Isilon products in 2019. The software also provides an Application Programming Interface (API), which can be used to interface with other software to move data, inspect content, and/or perform other functions. This offering has been designed for use in AI, Machine Learning (ML) and advanced analytics workloads. IBM describes the scope of the new software as covering data activation (through the use of its APIs), data visualization (including the custom reports), large scale data ingest (up to 30k records per second) and business-oriented data mapping (with its data tags).
- IBM AI-based Storage Insights now incorporates its AI capability to help diagnose storage network gridlock, and adds the ability to create individual custom reports.
- IBM Cloud Object Storage has been enhanced to support more concurrent users, increasing the maximum number of storage vaults supported by 50% per system. In future it also plans to enhance its IBM Cloud Object Storage software to support NVMe flash drives in ‘software-defined’ configurations.
IBM is also extending its ‘storage utility offerings’ by supporting two-way High Availability (HA) configurations at a monthly rate only 20% more than for leasing a single system and adding its TS7760 tape library to the list of products available for utility pricing contracts.
Relevant developments for enterprise storage customers
IBM’s storage offerings are being developed to fit into a multi-cloud world since many medium and large customer organisations are adopting services from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others alongside IBM’s own cloud services. It’s not an ‘either/or’ world – many (if not most) of these customers connecting their on-premise resources with private and public clouds. These mixed environments are becoming increasingly difficult to manage in a world where the number and severity of Cybersecurity attacks, security vulnerabilities, government and industry regulations are increasing.
IBM’s storage systems are being fitted with NVMe drives to take advantage of much better connection speeds between storage and processing and being extended for new ‘fabrics’ including Infiniband, Ethernet and Fibre Channel SANs. NVMe is not just a new drive protocol like SAS and SATA – it heralds a move towards much faster access and movement of data and a significant closing of the difference in speed between memory and storage devices.
But it’s not just about the storage systems; IBM’s Spectrum Storage range has advantages in being designed to extend to the management of other vendor’s arrays. When some of its competitors are still trying to provide federated management of their own products, IBM through Spectrum Virtualize has a unified approach, allowing customers to manage their data irrespective of which array its resident in. In fact, IBM has taken a wider role to provide advanced data management in some of the most elaborate and advanced customer environments. Today’s announcements show that IBM storage is delivering against its challenging roadmap most effectively.