IBM Enhances Storwize Storage Systems

By Eric Herzog, VP, product marketing and management, storage systems, IBM

IBM Corp. is announcing innovations, enhancements, and new features across its storage portfolio aimed at providing solutions for 21st century business and technology challenges.

Storwize V5000

We hear from business leaders every day about their aspirations, as well as their challenges and pain points. Businesses of all sizes have the same aspirations: they demand the highest levels of performance, security, flexibility, and functionality from their IT infrastructure, all with limited IT budgets. They need low risk IT solutions, to do more with fewer resources, and to drive business value from their oceans of data. This makes infrastructure automation and intelligence increasingly essential to the successful data driven company. Organizations are transforming and becoming agile, pivoting toward new opportunities faster – which their infrastructure must allow. These are the types of challenges that Storwize storage systems address.

“Simply stated: we are a Storwize/IBM Spectrum Storage Suite shop,” said Dave Anderson-Ward, server and storage technical team lead, Ordnance Survey. “The recent announcements and deployments of new innovations in these systems demonstrate that IBM Storwize storage can continue to be a foundation of our IT infrastructure as we move forward with business modernization. And thanks to all the added IBM Spectrum Storage features that can be easily added to Storwize solutions, these systems may now become even more of a competitive advantage to us than ever before.”

To address these critical business challenges, the company is announcing Storwize V5000 family offerings that complement Storwize V7000 Gen3. The Storwize V5010E and Storwize V5030E models provide increased performance and enterprise functionality, availability, and reliability in easy to buy, easy to use, and easy to manage entry storage systems.

Storwize V5100

NVMe technology can help lower storage latency, enabling analytics and AI applications that are powering the new economy. All-flash Storwize V5100F and V5100 bring the performance advantages of end-to-end NVMe into an affordable system. These new members of the Storwize V5000 family combine the capabilities of the company’s FlashCore technology with NVMe performance and the enterprise data services of Spectrum Virtualize SDS to create a solution with the capability, scalability, and speed required to support demanding AI and analytics applications.

“Because of its ability to provide solutions to a broad range of workload requirements at very affordable pricing, IBM Storwize family has always been an important member of our portfolio,” said Matthew Sirbu, director, data management and data center infrastructure, Softchoice Corp., a long-time IBM business partner. “A key ingredient of the Storwize success story has been the IBM commitment to continual innovation and improvement in order to maintain the Storwize leadership position in the marketplace. The announcement this week of Storwize V5100 offers the perfect example. Storwize V5100 brings NVMe into the mid-range market – a powerful advancement for the Storwize family, and yet another competitive advantage for us. These are the types of innovations that make us very pleased to be an IBM business partner.”

Multicloud architectures are a powerful new deployment model rapidly sweeping modern business ecosystems. Companies both large and small need to keep some data on-premises for increased performance and security, while at the same time moving other data out into the public cloud for increased cost-efficiency and business agility.

The entire Storwize family, FlashSystem 9100, SAN Volume Controller, and VersaStack leverage the extensive capabilities of Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud to simplify the implementation of multicloud solutions. Now, Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud can be deployed on Amazon Web Services, as well as IBM Cloud, to increase flexibility and choice.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud
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Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud can make it to move data between on-premises and public cloud, enables clients to develop DR strategies using cloud instead of a second data center, supports cloud-based DevOps to take advantage of the flexibility and agility of cloud for development, and helps support cyber resiliency with cloud-based ‘air gap’ snapshots to Amazon S3.

“IBM Spectrum Virtualize has been an industry-leading technology for more than 15 years,” said Ashish Nadkarni, group VP, WW Infrastructure, IDC. “Recently, multicloud capabilities have been a priority for IBM storage, with news of new features released almost monthly. This week is no exception. IBM just announced that along with other new functionality, Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud is now available through Amazon Web Services . The added flexibility, increased options, and lack of vendor lock-in should make Spectrum Virtualize even more attractive than ever.”

As noted above, businesses need to be focused more on developing new revenue streams and less on repetitive maintenance tasks. The firm’s Storage Insights can help address this challenge by providing system monitoring, analysis, reporting, optimization, and streamlined support at no cost to IBM storage customers. For mid-sized organizations, this can be a game changer.

Now, Storage Insights offers improved system alert handling so that even small IT groups can get the most from complex infrastructure with the least amount of effort and attention.

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Resource:
Video: Storage made simple: Meet the new IBM Storwize V5000 storage solutions