IBM Announces FlashSystem 900 and FlashSystem V9000 All-Flash Storage Solutions

IBM, a world-leading producer of flash storage arrays, is announcing the addition of two all-new all-flash enterprise storage solutions. These two new offerings provide industry-leading efficiency and performance, as well as superior reliability that helps lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and accelerates data-intensive infrastructures and applications. IBM’s latest solutions offer customers real-time analytical insights, providing up to 50X better performance than traditional enterprise HDD storage, and up to 4X more capacity in a smaller rack footprint than EMC XtremIO flash technology.

IBM’s FlashSystemR storage solutions allow IT departments to address new challenges while offering ongoing acceleration of application performance, and helping organizations to simplify their storage architecture, while lowering their storage costs. IBM’s FlashSystem V9000 provides software-defined storage with the speed benefits of NAND flash memory. Deploying FlashSystem V9000 allows customers to consolidate their existing storage system under a single management interface, while implementing cutting-edge virtualization and storage services throughout their storage architectures. IBM’s FlashSystem 900 offers extreme-level performance, enterprise-grade reliability, and macro efficiency. The FlashSystem 900 can be deployed in as little as two hours, rather than what is often days for deployment of conventional systems.

The building block of the new all-flash storage arrays is IBM’s FlashCoreT technology, which is a suite of innovations and features that enable FlashSystem to deliver superior performance as compared to enterprise disk systems. This makes it very flexible, as well as simple to deploy across entire IT architectures. These technology improvements equate to very real benefits for customers that wish to create cost-effective cloud architectures, engage with mobile customers at all opportunities, rapidly develop insights from analytics, and to address data security threats and cyber fraud attempts in real time.

For the last two-plus years, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) has been deploying IBM FlashSystem storage to deal with the ever-increasing volume of data that challenges their ability to keep their products stocked on store shelves. By utilizing IBM’s FlashSystem technology, CCBCC was able to improve from handling 100,000 data points to some 3.5 million data points per day. This resulted in CCBCC being able to improve their demand forecasting by concentrating their focus from warehouse-level analytics down to individual customer-level analytics. This allows for much better predictions of how much of what products are required on any given day, in any given store or vending machine. CCBCC is in the process of rolling out IBM’s latest flash storage technology to be able to process this data even faster than ever before.

According to Jamie Thomas, General Manager of IBM’s Storage and Software Defined Systems, “Many of our customers are pressured to derive greater business value from an ever-growing amount of data. In order to unlock key insights from big data through analytics, more and more customers, like Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, are using IBM FlashSystem to accelerate mission-critical applications and improve operations and services. These IBM solutions can offer extraordinary advantage to any business eager to make more, spend less, and move faster.”

Tom DeJuneas, IT Infrastructure Manager for CCBCC, notes that “The data we’re generating and analyzing daily is critical to our ability to stock Coke product on store shelves at the right time. We turned to FlashSystem storage in 2013. It has helped us achieve a 75 percent reduction in data processing, reducing jobs that took 45 minutes down to just six. Today, we’re using IBM’s newest FlashSystem solution to process data and draw key insights even faster, so we can dramatically improve our demand forecasting and get products on the right shelves at the right time.”

IBM’s FlashSystem technology utilizes Micron MLC NAND flash chips. FlashSystem is able to take advantage of Micron’s chip density and cost effectiveness, creating stronger data protection, enhanced application economics and improved reliability.

Darren Thomas, Vice President of Storage for Micron, observes that “IBM is a powerful leader in storage, globally recognized for delivering solutions that transform businesses. For FlashSystem, IBM draws on Micron’s flash expertise and deep flash media knowledge to deliver a truly differentiated storage solution. This unique collaboration signifies the future of enterprise storage.”

You can visit the IBM FlashSystem V9000 product page at IBM’s website here; and the FlashSystem 900 product page can be viewed here.  You can view the IBM press release announcing the FlashSystem V9000 and FlashSystem 900 here.