A very important aspect of this week’s
IBM® FlashSystem 9100 announcement is the level of industry-leadership involved. The
new FlashSystem platform brings together market-leading
IBM Spectrum Storage™ software-defined and modern data protection solutions with what has been regarded as one of the premier all-flash platforms available today –
FlashCore technology.
The combination is also important because of the challenges it helps end users solve and the opportunities it helps unlock. One such pair of very common challenges and opportunities is deeply related – the never-ending requirement to achieve better storage efficiency and the ability to reuse data assets for a wide range of value-generating business and IT use cases. IBM FlashSystem 9100 provides multiple solutions for both – centered on the powerful capabilities of
IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management (CDM).
A member of the IBM Spectrum Storage family, IBM Spectrum CDM is included in the baseline configuration of every IBM FlashSystem 9100 solution. Even broader IBM Spectrum CDM functionality and features can be added as part of the specific blueprints for IBM FlashSystem 9100 solutions targeting common requirements and challenges in data driven multi-cloud environments.
When deployed with the NVMe-optimized FlashCore technology inside IBM FlashSystem 9100, IBM Spectrum CDM facilitates data to help increase copy efficiency. IBM Spectrum CDM facilitates data reuse of secondary data for DevOps reporting, analytics, and much more. It makes copies available to data consumers when and where they need them, without needing the storage administrators to create snapshots or clones. It catalogs copy data from across your local and off-site cloud infrastructure, eliminates unnecessary duplicates, and compares copy requests to existing copies. Data consumers can use the self-service portal to create the copies they need, enabling business agility.
IBM Spectrum CDM powerfully leverages multi-cloud architectures. Not only does CDM enables developers to bring up live application environments using template-driven automation via API but also delivers:
• Simple provisioning storage even with complex enterprise topologies/SLAs
• Self-Service to empower individual users and developers
• DevOps capable – i.e. Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Tuxedo, etc.
This can help you maximize the economic benefit of your secondary data, be it on-premises or in a cloud environment.
IBM Spectrum CDM can leverage containerized private cloud environments as well. The interest in and deployment of containers is increasing daily, with billions of containers estimated to be deployed in the next few years. Container technology enables software to be packaged with the elements needed to run in any environment. Containers offer the versatility of virtual machines — but at a much smaller footprint and cost. The IBM Spectrum Storage technology available in IBM FlashSystem 9100 solutions enables simplified container use and management via IBM Spectrum Connect and the IBM Spectrum Access solutions blueprint. But leveraging the secondary data reuse in containerized applications can be problematic. IBM Spectrum CDM provides options to help IT administrators address this critical issue through its template centric API driven technology.
IBM FlashSystem 9100 offers many advantages that are already being recognized by industry analysts:
“NVMe is an important new technology, but organizations want more from their storage arrays than simply better performance in terms of lower latency, more IOPs or greater throughput. They want arrays that not only combine NVMe with strong storage services, but also fit well with their existing environments, including multi-cloud architectures, to allow the best use of their data," said Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451 Research.
To learn more about the today’s announcements, please read the
Core of the Data-driven Multi-Cloud Enterprise blog.
Watch our
on-demand announcement webcast.