IBM announced last updated its FS5000 series storage systems in February 2021, having launched them the year before. This week it announced the FS5045, which replaces the FS5035. Like the FS5035, the new product includes
- Data reduction (compression and deduplication),
- Scale-out clustering,
- IBM HyperSwap high-availability and
- Encryption
To differentiate it from the cheaper FS5015, giving it the same enhanced data resilience capabilities available on the higher-end IBM Flash System 5200, 7300, and 9500 models. Like the FS5015, the FS5045 comes complete with a licence to use IBM Spectrum Virtualize for help storage use in multi-cloud environments.
Hardware specifications for the FS5045 include:
- Maximum bandwidth: 12.4 GB/second (v 8GB/second for the FS5015)
- Maximum latency: 70μs
- IOPS: 1.2m
- Processor: Intel Broadwell DE (6 core)
- Disk configuration: SAS SSD, or mixed SAS SSD + HDD
- Maximum disk capacity: 550TB
IBM also announced that the FS5015 and FS5045 can now be covered in its Expert Care Basic and Advanced service contracts. It cut its list prices for its storage systems worldwide by 15% on April 20th this year. This seems sensible given the crashing prices on NAND devices I highlighted in my last post. This is clearly a time for enterprise customers to increase the capacity of raw storage in the arrays they use.