IBM's latest addition to its lineup of All-Flash Arrays is the FlashSystem 9100.
There are actually two models: the 9110 (model AF7) has 8-core processors, and the 9150 (model AF8) has 14-core processors. Both models are 2U 19-inch shelves with 24 drives on the front, with two control node canisters in the back. The term "FlashSystem 9100" applies to both 9110 and 9150 models.
Each canister has two processors, 64GB to 768GB of cache memory, an on-board 1GbE port for management, four 10GbE ports for Ethernet, and three HIC slots for I/O adapters, which can be any mix of quad-port FC cards, dual-port 25GbE Ethernet cards, or 12Gb SAS cards for expansion drawers.
For drives, you can have any mix of FlashCore Modules (FCM) or Industry-Standard NVMe (ISN) drives. The FlashCore modules are similar to the FlashCore boards in the FlashSystem 900, including Variable-Striped RAID, advanced flash management, heat binning, health separation, hardware-embedded encryption and compression.
These FCM are packaged into standard NVMe SSD form-factor, with 4.8, 9.6 and 19.2 TB capacities. The Industry-Standard NVMe drives come in 1.92, 3.84, 7.68 and 15.36 TB capacities to offer additional price/capacity options to clients.
A fully maxed out twenty-four FCM module system at 19.2TB represents approximately 400TB usable capacity, combined with 5:1 data footprint reduction with deduplication and compression, can provide up to an effective 2PB in as little as 2U of rack space!
The NVMe and FlashCore technology truly accelerates performance. Latencies as low as 100 microseconds are 2.5x lower than competitive offerings. Each control enclosure can deliver up to 2.5 Million IOPS, and a four-way cluster up to 10 million IOPS in just 8U!
You can mix and match FCM and ISN drives in the same controller, but FCM and ISN have to be in their own separate RAID groups. To use Distributed RAID6 (DRAID6), you need at least six drives for this.
IBM has made a "Statement of Direction" that these models are NVMe-OF hardware ready and will support both FC-NVMe and NVMe-OF over Ethernet by year end. Part of this involves changes to server-side software, including various operating systems, device drivers, and multi-pathing drivers.
The FlashSystem 9100 support up to 40U of expansion drawers, over 12Gb SAS, in two sizes. A 2U drawer for 24 SFF drives, and 5U for 92 SFF/LFF drives. Each FlashSystem 9100 can support up to 760 drives. These expansion drawers are not NVMe, so the Solid-State Drives (SSD) inside them use standard SAS. Consider using Easy Tier sub-LUN automated tiering to move fast data up to the FCM/ISN drives, and slower data to these SAS-based SSD.
Even though it doesn't have a "V" in its name, the FlashSystem 9100 runs Spectrum Virtualize, so you can also virtualize other storage behind it. Over 400 different storage devices from leading storage vendors are supported. The FlashSystem 9100 can be virtualized behind SVC or FlashSystem V9000.
FlashSystem 9100 can also cluster with Gen2 and Gen2+ models of the Storwize V7000 and V7000F controllers. You can connect up to four of any of these into a single cluster, supporting up to 3,040 drives.
The FlashSystem 9100 offers all of the features you have come to love from the rest of the Spectrum Virtualize products: data deduplication and compression, encryption, high-availability guarantee, data footprint reduction guarantee, hardware refresh option after three years, storage utility pricing, and IBM Storage Insights support.
IBM has no plans to withdraw either the existing FlashSystem V9000 nor the Storwize V7000/F models anytime soon. They continue to be available for purchase.
To learn more, see [IBM FlashSystem 9100] announcement letter, and fellow blogger Barry Whyte's post [Introducing the FlashSystem 9100 NVMe with FCM].