IBM Storage Systems To Boost Midsize Market

IBM announced a series of storage systems aimed at helping customers, particularly in the midrange, speed delivery of data to new workloads. These are developing in response to the continuing data explosion as the world becomes more and more instrumented.

The company unveiled a set of storage systems optimised for workloads such as transaction processing and real-time analytics. This reflects the company’s $6 billion annual investment in research and development, said Rod Adkins, senior vice president of the IBM Systems and Technology Group.

Relentless growth in storage needs

IDC has reported that businesses have begun to struggle with the volume and evolving nature of the data they are already collecting. They are under pressure to turn this data into insight and grappling with how they are going to store and secure it all. Worldwide demand for storage capacity will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 49.8 percent from 2009-2014.

A standout among the new products is a midrange disk storage system, called the Storwize V7000, designed to manage, efficiently and cost-effectively, the torrent of data flowing into companies. This will enable data to be delivered swiftly for such workloads as transaction processing -like the growing volume of transactions completed from the Web and mobile and embedded devices, said Brian Truskowski, general manager of system storage and networking at IBM.

The Storwize V7000 system can help simplify administrative tasks such as set-up and management, IBM said. And the new system can reduce storage-rack space by up to 67 percent when compared with competitive offerings, allowing room for clients’ future growth. It also includes a highly-integrated set of advanced software for storage efficiency that frees clients from buying piecemeal or making trade-offs between price and capability.

“We’re at an interesting inflection point in our industry where data is changing the game,” Adkins said. “What’s required is continued innovation. With this growth in data we will continue to deliver leadership capabilities in analytics, security, compression, de-duplication and archiving. Our investment model will continue to focus around those activities.”

Adkins called the Storwize V700 a breakthrough midrange product. He added that “we integrated virtualisation and you can pool your storage resources – and not just IBM storage resources but any storage resources.”

Truskowski said there has been a feature gap in midrange storage, in that midrange storage systems tend to struggle to scale. However, the V7000 does not have that problem because it is a modular system that is designed to grow as a customer’s needs grow.

“The first thing to note about the V7000 is the modularity of the system and the ability to grow as you grow,” Truskowski said. “You can add up to nine enclosures and scale up to 240 drives. And the second thing you notice about the V7000 is its ease of use.”

The Storwize V7000 combines high performance with ease of use, Truskowski said, and built-in advanced storage efficiency. This includes System Storage Easy Tier software, developed by IBM Research, which can improve performance by up to 200 percent, the company claimed.

Easy Tier automatically moves the most active data, such as credit card transactions, to faster solid-state drives (SSDs) to prioritise and provide quick access for workloads like analytics. Secondary data, retained for regulatory or archival requirements, is moved to more cost-effective storage technologies.

Henry Baltazar, storage and systems analyst at the 451 Group, told eWEEK, “If you look at the storage market, the midrange spot is one of the most highly competitive areas and, because of that, it’s a key area to have strength. So the two main features [of Storwize V7000] they are pushing are big.”

The other big takeaway, Baltazar said, is IBM’s virtualisation support. “Because you’re able to, if you have a lot of systems sitting around, you can put the Storwize system in front of them to aggregate all that space together,” he said. “In the old days before virtualisation you had to buy silos of capacity – and silos are always inefficient because one app could be using 90 percent of capacity and another only 20 percent.

“Virtualisation allows you to more efficiently dole it [capacity] out. Another side benefit is a business impact benefit, in that it will make it easier for IBM to steal some accounts,” he added.

The new IBM storage systems build on other storage innovations from IBM. These include technologies that can eliminate the need to repeatedly make copies of the same data and scale-out storage technologies to support growth, particularly of unstructured data like video and photos, and the high-performance workloads of cloud computing.