We are introducing an enhanced version of the IBM Storage Scale System 6000 that’s designed to help clients accelerate their deployment of generative AI and other performance-intensive business workloads.
For those unfamiliar with our file and object storage products, IBM Storage Scale is software-defined storage for managing both structured and unstructured data. IBM Storage Scale System 6000 is a hardware implementation of Storage Scale software that is optimized for the most demanding AI, high-performance computing, analytics, and hybrid cloud workloads. It’s designed to be a fast and flexible way for organizations to build a global data platform around their file and object data, with support for the NVIDIA GPUdirect Storage protocol that enables a direct data path between GPU memory and local or remote storage.
The new version of Storage Scale System 6000 adds two main capabilities:
– As an alternative to the current industry-standard NVMe flash drives, systems can now be configured with 19.2TB or 38.4TB NVMe-based IBM FlashCore Modules for increased data density, capacity, and data resilience.
– The system’s overall capacity can be significantly increased by adding one or more expansion enclosures, enabling organizations to efficiently process massive AI and analytics datasets.
The new FlashCore Module 4 (FCM4) NVMe computational storage technology improves both data density and data resilience. Existing IBM FlashSystem products scan all incoming data down to block level granularity as it’s being written, using inline data corruption detection software and cloud-based AI to help identify anomalies that might indicate the start of a cyberattack
The new technology enabled by FCM4 is designed to continuously monitor statistics gathered from every single I/O using machine learning models to help detect anomalies like ransomware in less than a minute.1
The other big news is the IBM Storage Scale System Model 091 – an enterprise-class, fully redundant 24G SAS storage expansion enclosure optimized for the Storage Scale System 6000. Each enclosure supports 91 self-encrypting SAS hard disk drives (HDDs). Clients can choose between capacity models configured entirely with HDDs and hybrid models containing both HDDs and SSDs.
Up to nine expansion enclosures can be attached to the Storage Scale System 6000, delivering up to 18PB of HDD storage capacity per rack and virtually linearly scalable SAS performance using 24G SAS. The ability to add multiple expansion enclosures makes the Storage Scale System 6000 a great fit for a whole new range of workloads that operate on multi-petabyte data sets.
By delivering high-speed access to data regardless of protocol, location, or format, IBM Storage Scale System 6000 enables customers to accelerate their AI pipeline to unlock the value of their structured and unstructured data.
The new Storage Scale System 6000 products are generally available now.
1 Internal experimentation by IBM Research has demonstrated detection of ransomware within one minute of the ransomware starting its encryption process. This experiment was done on a FlashSystem 5200 with 6 FCMs with the 4.1 firmware load. The 5200 had 8.6.3 GA level software loaded. The host connected to the 5200 was running Linux with XFS Filesystem. In this particular case, the IBM ransomware simulator called WannaLaugh was used. Underlying system must be compatible with FCM4.1 and version 8.6.3 GA level software loaded in order to receive results obtained.
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