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A year and a half ago, IBM announced its commitment to developing its own NAND flash storage lineup by putting a full $1 billion in research and development money where its corporate mouth was.
The results of that initiative continue to emanate from Armonk, N.Y., and they will for a while to come.
Big Blue on July 26 unveiled its latest all-flash array, the DeepFlash 150, designed to process big data workloads in a cost-effective manner. With the DeepFlash 150, IBM now offers a flash array portfolio that covers almost all types of workloads.
IBM, which has always had to partner for flash media, hooked up with SanDisk for its InfiniFlash hardware to use in the DeepFlash 150, something the company revealed back in March.
IBM fully realizes that pricing is becoming a major consideration in flash storage investments, with competition driving the costs way down during the last few years. For most of the last two decades, flash storage was always considered way too expensive for many midsize and smaller enterprise systems, but no more.
The DeepFlash 150 is designed to be price competitive—roughly $1 per GB—while still being able to process massive data sets. The new array has an all-flash density of up to 170TB per rack unit—to a maximum 7PB of flash—in a single rack space.
This high level of flash density, IBM said, makes the DeepFlash 150 relevant for use cases such as financial services, health care, e-commerce, telecommunications, media and entertainment, and cloud service providers.
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