Storage performance and capacity are crucial in the modern data center, and today we’re introducing solutions that expertly address both concerns – a new version of IBM Scale System 6000 and a new expansion enclosure that significantly increases total capacity. These enhancements will help customers further accelerate AI workloads and deliver continued innovation and business growth while reducing TCO. The new capabilities leverage NVIDIA DPU infrastructure to help organizations worldwide run their most performance-intensive workloads at scale.
With the introduction of IBM Storage Scale System 7.0.0 software, IBM Storage Scale System 6000 IBM has now tripled the maximum capacity to over 42PB per rack by adding support for industry-standard QLC flash storage. It adds support for industry-standard QLC flash storage (in 30TB, 60TB and 122TB configurations), wider erasure code support (16+2/3P) for increased disk efficiency and performance, and increased write performance.
In addition, the new release supports the Storage Scale System data acceleration tier, which is designed to help organizations tackle the IOPS bottlenecks that can constrain real-time AI inferencing by delivering fast, stable, and predictable performance. The data acceleration tier leverages high-performance NVMe-oF to deliver up to 340 gigabytes per second throughput and up to 28M IOPS. It is engineered to offer exceptional compression capability and data density while drawing less power.
To address workloads that operate on massive data sets, we’re introducing the IBM Scale System All-Flash Expansion Enclosure, which integrates NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs for maximum performance at scale. The BF-3 adapters enable up to 400GB/s of high-performance network throughput and NVMeoF offload capability for the Storage Scale System. Each expansion enclosure can deliver up to 100GB/s of throughput and more than 3PB of raw flash capacity in a 2U form factor.
The new expansion enclosure is optimized for high performance AI training, data inferencing, HPC, and data intensive workloads. It supports up to 4 NVIDIA BlueField -3 data processing units (DPUs) and 26 dual-port industry standard QLC flash drives in a 2U form factor. With the introduction of the 128TB QLC NVMe SSDs, the enhanced Storage Scale System 6000 delivers more than 47PB of cost-effective high-density flash capacity in a single 42U rack.
The scalability of the new All-Flash Expansion enclosure also supports bigger caches and multitenant service provider requirements. With IBM Storage Scale System 6000, multitenancy is highly configurable at the cluster, file system, or fileset level. This gives service providers and large-scale AI factories the ability to isolate workloads, enforce security policies, and optimize resource allocation without sacrificing performance. Whether supporting supercomputers, HPC environments, or AI-as-a-service offerings, this architecture ensures secure, scalable, and cost-efficient multitenant operations across diverse data-intensive workloads.
IT infrastructure teams are faced with unprecedented data challenges to scale AI while continuing to support all existing workloads. Storage Scale System 6000 addresses these challenges by providing a global data platform that enables globally dispersed teams to collaborate on data regardless of protocol, location, or format.