IBM Hybrid Storage Family Starting at $50,000: DS8880, Scaling Up to 3PB

IBM Corp. announced the DS8880 family of enterprise hybrid storage, a powerful, next generation system designed to accelerate business critical applications and real-time data insights for clients requiring increased performance, data protection and non-stop availability.

Operating a business today requires constant uptime and the risk of data loss is always at the forefront of banking, financial, healthcare and other data-driven enterprises. By 2020, 15% of digital businesses will fail due to inadequate protection against downtime. Security is also paramount if data breaches cause major disruption to both customer trust and business operations, since the cost of a single data breach can spiral to $3.8 million, up 23% since 2013.

As a large, broadcast satellite television provider in India, IBM’s client Tata Sky, needs to constantly move at an ever-faster pace to gain insight quickly, protect critical data, eliminate downtown and avoid business risk – all at the same time. The DS8000 family allows the management of growing storage demands required by the realities of today’s digital businesses.

“Our business simply cannot operate without mission-critical storage that provides the utmost BC and operational efficiency in both our primary and DR sites,” said N. Ravinshanker, CIO, Tata Sky, whose organization relies on mitigating risk of data loss and at the same time, accessing data swiftly. “With IBM DS8000 hybrid storage, our response time has improved and queries now return in less than one second, drastically reducing call center time while improving efficiency.”

The DS8880 accelerates mission-critical applications up to two times faster, making it a storage option for banking and financial industries, use with electronic medical records, as well as ERP, CRM and retail systems that need reliable, agile and constant access to data.

The latest architecture also mitigates risk since all components are redundant and can be upgraded online. This provides availability and increased productivity by minimizing downtime to approximately 30s per year – even less if a multi-site DR solution is also installed.

With a large-scale disaster, business continuance is just as important as data protection and the DS8880 allows remote mirroring that can be integrated with a HA server capability to provide high level of availability.

For those customers who are looking for integration with cloud-based and mission critical environments, the DS8880 family offers integration with IBM z Systems and other IBM compute platforms to improve business processes and services by enabling systems for the dynamic demands of analytics, big data and cloud environments. It maximizes utilization of resources, including staff productivity, space and cost with streamlined management and operations and 30% reduction in footprint on a new 19-inch rack.

“In today’s fast, analytics data-driven, cloud-based world, our clients need storage options that they can rely on and that directly impact their ability to service customers and outperform competitors,” said Jamie Thomas, GM, IBM storage. “As part of IBM’s bold commitment to storage, the launch of the DS8880 family offers an ideal solution for clients that require high performing, mission critical acceleration to manage the changing conditions in the modern enterprise.”

The new DS8880 family of storage incorporates a high performance flash enclosure module providing optimized performance for mission critical applications. Additionally, the system can scale up to 3PB, offering features for compliance and security. The DS8880 GUI also includes intuitive navigation and streamlined configuration processes, providing, customizable views, interactive menus and a configuration wizard to help administrators configure an entire solution in less than 30mn.

The new family of storage is available worldwide with a starting price of $50,000 and with new licensing packages for simplified ordering and installation.

Models include:

• DS8884 – a lower cost, space-saving system with advanced, easy-to-use operations and continuous availability for running critical workloads on IBM z Systems, Power Systems or distributed systems, as a dedicated platform for consolidated systems or for multiple platforms.
• DS8886 – an enterprise system that accelerates critical applications with up to two times better performance backed by more than six nines availability, multi-site replication; and IBM z Systems, Power Systems or distributed systems integration – in a scalable package.
• DS8888 – an all-flash storage system, with availability in early 2016, designed for extreme acceleration of mission critical applications, with non-stop availability and simplified integration.