IBM Storage News: IBM Accelerates Enterprise Storage Capabilities for Big Data

IBM's Brian Truskowski, General Manager, Storage and Networking  ( above)  shared a number of important announcements regarding new IBM Storage capabilities with IBM customers at a special conference today in Pinehurst, North Carolina.  Mr. Truskowski shared how organizations and IBM customers are continuing to struggle with ever increasing loads of data. The growth of data from sharing IT plans, to Powerpoint files, to corporate & medical records, even from social media has created daily challenges for IT administrators.  Who does IT store and back-up all that data. Mounting data volumes are not only stressing system performance and manageability, but security as well. To help customers respond to these challenges, IBM today announced enhancements to two of its high-end storage systems. The new enhancements feature dramatic performance and security updates.  As Mr. Truskowski noted at today's Pinehurst conference, as more and more organizations turn to the cloud to store their data, security becomes more important than ever.  Following is a summary of today's announcements:

The IBM System Storage DS8870 is the newest and most powerful member of the company’s DS8000 family of “high-density” enterprise class storage systems. Upgraded with the advanced IBM POWER7 processors and up to 1TB of system cache, the DS8870 delivers up to three times more performance for transaction processing applications than the current DS8800 model.⁽¹⁾ What’s more, according to the Storage Performance Council, the DS8870 has also achieved the number one ranking in its standardized SPC-2 benchmark result.⁽²⁾ In addition, the DS8870 comes standard with full self-encrypting drives for additional security.  IBM Virtualization Engine TS7700 Release 3, a system that melds virtualization with magnetic tape. The system is an update of the TS7700 Enterprise Virtual Tape Library System, which is typically used in enterprises powered by mainframes and is designed to help administrators virtualize their existing tape storage systems for improved manageability, capacity and security. The Virtualization Engine takes the system to new levels of each, with end-to-end encryption and the ability to connect up to six systems in a grid architecture for greater access to information, as well as redundancy. 

The new Technical Computing for Big Data solution includes IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS), an advanced file management platform often used in high performance computing environments for storing and delivering large volumes of data for weather modeling, oil exploration and digital media production. Combining GPFS with the latest IBM Platform Symphony scheduler and application platform, as well as the IBM Intelligent Cluster, delivers enterprise clients a scalable, high performance environment for analytics.

To learn more about these announcements, visit IBM on the web at: www.ibm.com/storage.

(1) IBM, “IBM System Storage DS8870 Performance Whitepaper,” October 2012.

(2) Storage Performance Council, “SPC Benchmark 2™ Full Disclosure Report IBM Corporation, IBM System Storage DS8870,” October 2012. For more on the SPC ranking please visit: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc2#b00062