IBM Rolls Out All-flash Storage for Cognitive Workloads

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ds8880Today IBM announced a set of all-flash storage solutions designed for midrange and large enterprises where high availability, continuous up-time, and performance are critical.

The DS8880 All-Flash family is targeted at users that have experienced poor storage performance due to latency, low server utilization, high energy consumption, low system availability and high operating costs. These same users have been listening, learning and understand the data value proposition of being a cognitive business,” said Ed Walsh, general manager, IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure. “In the coming year we expect an awakening by companies to the opportunity that cognitive applications, and hybrid cloud enablement, bring them in a data driven marketplace.”

The new family of DS8880 all-flash systems designed to meet a wide variety of business applications, workloads, and use cases where microsecond response times and high availability are sought. The family includes:

  • Business Class Storage – the IBM DS8884F has been designed for traditional applications such as ERP, order processing, database transactions, customer relationship management and human resources information systems. It offers the lowest entry cost for midrange enterprises with 256 GB Cache (DRAM) and between 6.4-154 TB of Flash Capacity.
  • Enterprise Class Storage – the IBM DS8886F has been engineered for high speed transactional operations like high-performance online transaction processing, high-speed commercial data processing, high-performance data warehouse and data mining and critical financial transaction systems. It provides users 2 TB Cache (DRAM) and between 6.4-614.4 TB of Flash Capacity.
  • Analytic Class Storage – the IBM DS8888F is ideal for cognitive and real-time analytics and decision making including predictive analytics, real time optimization, machine learning and cognitive systems, natural language speech and video processing. To support this it delivers 2 TB Cache (DRAM) and between 6.4 TB-1.22 PB of Flash Capacity providing superior performance and capacity able to address the most demanding business workload requirements.

According to Scott Sinclair, a senior analyst at ESG, the announcement by IBM on its family of new all-flash DS8880 solutions is very impressive in regards to performance gains and the move to offer flash across the portfolio a great step. By moving data to another path IBM is at the next level of innovation in order to take advantage of next generation technologies. Further to this, the classification of the new family of DS8880 into business, enterprise, and analytic solutions makes a lot of sense.

The new family of DS8880 all-flash data systems will be available worldwide on January 20, 2017.

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