IBM’s Flash Storage Play: Inside Big Blue’s Move

by Darryl K. Taft

At an event in New York City, IBM launched new FlashSystem appliances and announced plans to invest heavily in boosting the use of flash technology.

Ed Walsh, IBM’s vice president of storage systems marketing and strategy, welcomes attendees and sets the agenda for the FlashSystem event at IBM’s New York City offices at 590 Madison Ave.

Steve Mills, IBM’s senior vice president and group executive for software and systems, discusses why the company has taken a big bet on flash technology and introduces its new FlashSystem appliances.

IBM says greater use of flash technology improves performance, reduces cost and enables new opportunities.

Over the last 10 years, CPU performance, and DRAM, network and bus speed have all grown significantly, while disk storage speed has hardly improved at all. Enter flash.

IBM says flash represents a new tipping point in systems, given the performance gains the technology can deliver.

Flash leads to lower software license costs, higher storage utilization, fewer servers, lower environmental costs, and lower operational and support costs.

In a real-world example, IBM shows how flash technology cuts costs at a wholesale provider.

IBM says potential use cases for its flash technology include online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, computational apps, high-performance computing (HPC), cloud-scale infrastructures, virtual infrastructures and analytical apps.

IBM said flash technology provides best-in-class durability with longer life.

IBM’s new FlashSystem storage appliance line supports 22 million input/output operations per second (IOPS).

IBM demonstrated its new FlashSystem storage appliance running with IBM Power 780 system and IBM DB2 v10.5.

Here are details on the IBM FlashSystem 820 and the SAN Volume Controller with FlashSystem 820.

IBM will open 12 flash Centers of Competency around the world for customers to do proof-of-concepts and more.

IBM customers Thomson Reuters, Kroger, ViON and Sprint talk about their experiences with flash storage.

From left to right, the panel of IBM flash storage customers are Bob Bruce, vice president of ViON; Rick Mattingly, director of IT infrastructure projects at Kroger; Al Candela, head of technology and service at Thomson Reuters; and Karim Abdullah, director of IT operations at Sprint.

Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon, moderated the IBM customer panel.

Take a look under the cover of a FlashSystem 820 storage appliance.