IBM Boosts its Flash Storage Solutions to Develop Intelligent Apps for Cloud Storage Providers

ARMONK, NY: IBM launches three new flash array products into its portfolio to help clients more quickly extract value from data for cloud-based applications and workloads so it can be turned into a competitive advantage. 

The new offerings include FlashSystem A9000, FlashSystem A9000R and IBM DS8888.

The A9000 is an appliance designed for hyperscale and cloud storage to help mid-sized enterprises. It can retune itself when customers add more storage, and its management software allows administrators run more than 100 appliances from one user interface.

The A9000R is a petabyte-scale rack-based system for large enterprises and cloud service providers. It’s designed for multiple tenants and has quality-of-service features to make sure one tenant doesn’t monopolize network or processing capacity at the expense ofothers.

The FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R both consolidate data reduction features, including deduplication, pattern removal and real-time compression. IBM FlashCore technology delivers consistent low latency performance.

The all-flash IBM DS8888 deals with customer databases and data-intensive applications and helps to improve business performance and customer satisfaction.

"The workloads our department manages include CAD files for land mapping, geographic information system (GIS) applications and satellite imagery for the over 9.2 million acres of State Trust lands we’re responsible to oversee. The data we manage is tied directly to our goal to make this information available and to increase its analytical capabilities,” says William Reed, chief technology officer at the Arizona State Land Department. "After exhaustive, comparative proof of concept testing we chose IBM's FlashSystem, which has helped to increase our client productivity by 7 times while reducing our virtual machine boot times by over 85 percent."

IBM flash storage also helps in solving data management problems. IBM's new Hyper-Scale Manager developed in collaboration with clients and leveraging IBM Design Thinking is user interface that streamlines data movement and can manage more than 100 nodes from a single user interface. The Hyper-Scale Manager reduces mouse clicks by more than 50 percent and eliminates time wasted toggling between the user interface and corresponding files.