IBM’s storage division made a number of significant announcements yesterday. As in previous quarters I had the privilege of talking with a number of executives, this time including Eric Herzog (CMO and VP) and Carlos Fuente (Distinguished Engineer), who were able to present and answer my questions on their strategy and introductions.
New Storwize V5010E, V5030E, V5100 and 5V100F arrays, 32Gbps FC networking added to high-end arrays
The Storwize V5000 family is the smallest of IBM’s current storage family; launched in 2016 is available through other suppliers – most notably with Cisco in VersaStack converged infrastructure systems and has been available through Lenovo, which took over IBM’s System x family in the 2014, becoming a major player in the server market as a result. Last year it decided that it would only sell these systems through indirect channels of distribution.
The 4 new Storwize are the:
- V5010E, which has 4 times the maximum cache, twice the maximum IOPS and a 30% lower price than the V5010 that it replaces. Its maximum capacity is 12PB of flash using high-density 30TB flash drives. It can also be upgraded non-disruptively to the V5030E.
- V5030E, which includes data compression and deduplication and can scale to 23PB in a single system, or to 32PB using 2-way clustering and the new 30TB flash drives. It has 20% better IOPS and is 30% cheaper than the V5030, which it replaces.
- V5100F and V5100, which have 9 times more cache than the V5030, 2.4 times the maximum IOPS of the 5030F with data reduction enabled but its street price is roughly 10% higher than the V5030. They offer high performance data reduction, are based on NVMe drives, use IBM FlashCore modules and 32Gbps Fibre Channel networking, and they are ready for Storage Class Memory (SCM) when available.
While all of the V5000 family use flash drives, IBM FlashCore Modules are only available in the V5100F, V7000 and FlashSystem 9100 lines. These currently have 4.8TB, 9.6TB and 19.2TB capacity options at compression rates of up to 5:1. These higher end arrays and VersaStack systems now support 32Gps Fibre Channel, which is available as an upgrade to existing systems. IBM has also achieved FIPS 140-2 certification for the FlashCore Modules. The new SAN18E extensions switch supports 12 x 32Gbps Fibre Channel ports alongside 6 x FCIP WAN ports running at 1 or 10Gbps.
According to IBM the Storwize range outperforms Dell EMC’s current Unity line in terms of IOPS. It will be interesting to look at the comparison again once Dell EMC has refreshed its own lines.
IBM storage’s expanding multicloud approach
Over time IBM’s storage division has been developing a data-driven multicloud approach – a practical implementation of its arrays used in on-premises, private cloud and attachment to specific public IaaS and PaaS services from IBM itself, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. It’s selected the largest of these (see my Figure above for my current market shares) and plans to expand to others over time. Its vision is also being used across other IBM divisions.
Yesterday it announced that its Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud now supports AWS, which will allow easier and cheaper data mobility from on-premises to cloud, allowing customers to use AWS for Disaster Recovery and/or make economic, scale and performance choices more effectively. Its latest enhancements include auto entitlement checking, provisioning on pairs of AWS EC2 instances and the ability to virtualize AWS EBS volumes.
Spectrum Virtualize (in Storwize and other systems including SVC) has been designed to work with other suppliers’ arrays – a total which now stands at over 450. With Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, IBM has a number of pre-tested blueprints including workload mobility with NSX and VMware, Business Continuity and cyber resiliency with ‘air gapped’ snapshots.
Other enhancements to IBM’s Spectrum storage software offerings include:
- Scale – improved performance for SMB and NFS protocols and better-advanced file management scalability and resiliency, as well as certification on HortonWorks Data Platform 3.1 for Hadoop data analytics.
- Accelerate, Connect and its DS8888 high-end arrays have been enhanced to work more effectively for container workloads.
- Storage Insights Pro and Control – these packages, which provide cloud-based management and support using AI and ML, have been enhanced to include custom alerts and to apply alert policies across device groups for consistency.
IBM has been one of the first vendors to endorse the new Container Storage Interface (CSI) orchestration and management standards to improve the relevancy of its offerings when used for container-base workloads. I expect most other storage systems suppliers to follow.
IBM is unique among storage system software suppliers in offering a ‘suited’ approach to sales of Spectrum Storage – offering packages of 9 elements at a price which gives users savings over buying individual packages one-by-one. The basic features and built-in management tools for even its lowest cost arrays exceed those of most of its competitors.
The path to Storage Class Memory and byte-level storage
IBM describes the new Storwize V5100F and V5100 systems (as well as Storize V7000 Gen3 and FlashSystem 9100) as ‘SCM ready’. When available, Storage Class Memory (SCM) devices will bridge the speed gap and price gaps between computer memory (DRAM) and storage devices (whether disk or NAND). Currently the largest and cheapest storage devices are disk-based, NAND is faster, while DRAM memory is the fastest and most expensive. When available SCM devices will be closer in performance to DRAM and will require some major changes in the design of storage arrays. In particular we will need to add byte-level storage to block, file and object storage techniques already in use. We have a long way to go before mass adoption of SCM, which is liable to be more disruptive than the introduction of NAND a decade or so ago and one reason why my SCM forecast in the Figure at the head of this paper is for a slow, rather than revolutionary rise. Nevertheless IBM is sensible to address the upcoming change early and more capable than most storage system suppliers to succeed early in this important market.
Widening the customer base
IBM’s announced 4 new arrays in its Storwize V5000 family, a range now sold exclusively through indirect channels. It has also made numerous enhancements to its other arrays and its Spectrum Storage portfolio of storage software products – most notably in increasing the ability to use these within specific multicloud environments. It has an eye for the future, preparing for the advent of Storage Class Memory as it did in the past for flash drives, NVMe drives and their fabrics. As always in recent quarters its changes launches show its eagerness to expand its presence beyond its traditional large customer base by launching smaller arrays and enhancing its software for these and all other users.
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