I spent some time with IBM’s Eric Herzog (Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Global Channels for IBM’s storage division), Andy Wall (CTO for block storage flash, IBM fellow), and Eric Stouffer (VP of Offering Management for Distributed Storage Solutions) recently to take an early look at the announcements made by the company today, which entail the strong pairing of storage systems and storage software into a single solution for today’s data driven multi-cloud enterprise, while the theme of its last big announcement was primarily around storage software.
My Figure shows the quarterly revenues made by the suppliers of raw and system storage – it demonstrates the extent to which solid state NAND and DRAM sales (including those in client devices) are overtaking disk drives and growing at a much faster rate than storage systems.
Introducing the FlashSystem 9100 (FS9100) arrays
IBM introduces the FS9100 flash controller module today – initially including the FS9110 and FS9150 offerings. They are based on Micron’s 64-layer 3D NAND chips, use Intel SkyLake processors (8-core x86 in the FS9110 and 14-core in the FS9150) and offer significant performance (and a 10-15% price/GB) improvement over the existing V9000, which I suspect they will ultimately replace. The new arrays compliment the A9000 designed for use by cloud service providers and the A9000R – by high-end enterprise customers.
Although the headline news is the incorporation of NVMe, the new products are more important for other reasons. In fact, they are at the heart of its storage strategy, which spans its hardware, software defined storage, multi-cloud, financing and channel approaches. Features include:
- The new products are fast, running at 10m IOPS, which make them great for machine learning; while this speed combined with very low latency of 100 microseconds makes them great for large scale transactional workloads, while their power full bandwidth (34GB/sec for the FS9100 and 136GB/sec for a cluster of four FS9100s) make them ideal for bandwidth intensive workloads such as Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
- Compression, de-duplication and other data reduction technologies included on the FS9100 will give some customers a five times reduction in disk space used – adding up to 2PB in the 2U FS9100 and 32PB in a 42U industry standard single rack full of FS9100.
- Added (AES 256) encryption, which is integrated into the hardware, runs all the time and thus has no impact on performance. This uses a single key per array, which is useful for large organisations running large single workloads. Data centers with many multi-tenanted workloads will need to continue to use encryption at the application level.
- The new boxes will be FIPS 140-2 certified shortly after general availability, which is important for their use in healthcare, financial services and government deployments.
- IBM’s Hyperswap software allows it to offer 100% data availability – an advantage over competitors which currently only offer 99.9999% (‘six nines’) availability.
IBM is adding the FS9100 to its existing ‘utility’ pricing model for customers who don’t want to purchase the new storage systems outright. IBM will install an array fully-populated with flash, which, depending on usage, will go up or down every month which is easily monitored by the customer and IBM bills the customers on a quarterly basis. However, Eric pointed out that these customers may end up paying more than outright purchasers – like other financial offerings of this type it’s “more like a mortgage than a true utility (which would always be cheaper)”.
IBM is a Flash Controller Module – not just a Flash Storage – vendor
Since its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems in 2013 IBM has been a high-end Flash Core Module (FCM) supplier in competition with suppliers such as Dell EMC and Pure Storage. It is incorporating the significant improvement NVMe drives have over SATA and SAS ones to link new arrays together (NVMeoF). Specifically, it already helps a few HPC customers with ‘over Infiniband’ (in collaboration with Mellanox) versions and has plans for NVMe ‘over Ethernet’ configurations . However, its biggest opportunity is in NVMe ‘over Fibre Channel’ Storage Area Networks (SANs) versions, which are the most important ones for large organisations and in which IBM has a long successful history. I expect IBM to introduce these later in 2018.
At launch the FS9100 beats Pure Storage’s X90 in latency (100ms v 250ms) and the Dell EMC’s PowerMax arrays in bandwidth (136GB/sec v 10GB/sec) in a much smaller form factor (8U v 40U rack height). It’s early days for comparing these products; I expect industry benchmarks will develop to make it easier in future.
IBM’s systems strategy is focused on selling arrays based on IBM’s FlashCore modules (such as the FS9100), but IBM also supports industry standard SSD modules as well from Samsung, Toshiba and others. It has added a SAS expansion capability, although it doesn’t expect to sell very many of them, except for customers requiring large configurations.
One step on the road towards Storage Class Memory systems
Although sales of raw SSDs are out growing storage systems overall and even the ‘flash only’ ones today, we need storage systems vendors to make new raw storage work securely and effectively in large scale mission critical systems more than ever.
NVMe is a vital new storage protocol designed for SSDs, which eliminates the current bottlenecks of connecting them using SATA and SAS protocols originally developed for spinning disks. NVMe ‘over Fabric’ is a high-end development enabling vast grids of flash storage arrays and DAS to be linked and used together in SAN and NAS configurations rather than having to be connected one-to-one to server PCIe slots, as they are today.
IBM is a leader in producing sophisticated, technically advanced, high-performance flash storage modules and is well prepared for 2019 when high-end customers will be putting NVMeoF into production for the first time. Its new FS9100 is at the heart of a strategy spanning storage systems and storage software that will help IBM retain its position in the storage and server markets. It will also help it to succeed when eventually Storage Class Memory systems expand the need for technical expertise far beyond the introduction of NVMeoF.