IBM announces the new FlashSystem 9100

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Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements! After much needed vacation in Cancun Mexico, Lake Havasu and Sedona, Arizona, I am glad to be back at work! This week, I was visiting clients in the Los Angeles area.

IBM FlashSystem 9100

IBM's latest addition to its lineup of All-Flash Arrays is the FlashSystem 9100.

There are actually two models: the 9110 (model AF7) has 8-core processors, and the 9150 (model AF8) has 14-core processors.  Both models are 2U 19-inch shelves with 24 drives on the front, with two control node canisters in the back. The term "FlashSystem 9100" applies to both 9110 and 9150 models.

Each canister has two processors, 64GB to 768GB of cache memory, an on-board 1GbE port for management, four 10GbE ports for Ethernet, and three HIC slots for I/O adapters, which can be any mix of quad-port FC cards, dual-port 25GbE Ethernet cards, or 12Gb SAS cards for expansion drawers.

For drives, you can have any mix of FlashCore Modules (FCM) or Industry-Standard NVMe (ISN) drives. The FlashCore modules are similar to the FlashCore boards in the FlashSystem 900, including Variable-Striped RAID, advanced flash management, heat binning, health separation, hardware-embedded encryption and compression.

These FCM are packaged into standard NVMe SSD form-factor, with 4.8, 9.6 and 19.2 TB capacities. The Industry-Standard NVMe drives come in 1.92, 3.84, 7.68 and 15.36 TB capacities to offer additional price/capacity options to clients.

A fully maxed out twenty-four FCM module system at 19.2TB represents approximately 400TB usable capacity, combined with 5:1 data footprint reduction with deduplication and compression, can provide up to an effective 2PB in as little as 2U of rack space!

The NVMe and FlashCore technology truly accelerates performance. Latencies as low as 100 microseconds are 2.5x lower than competitive offerings. Each control enclosure can deliver up to 2.5 Million IOPS, and a four-way cluster up to 10 million IOPS in just 8U!

You can mix and match FCM and ISN drives in the same controller, but FCM and ISN have to be in their own separate RAID groups. To use Distributed RAID6 (DRAID6), you need at least six drives for this.

IBM has made a "Statement of Direction" that these models are NVMe-OF hardware ready and will support both FC-NVMe and NVMe-OF over Ethernet by year end. Part of this involves changes to server-side software, including various operating systems, device drivers, and multi-pathing drivers.

The FlashSystem 9100 support up to 40U of expansion drawers, over 12Gb SAS, in two sizes. A 2U drawer for 24 SFF drives, and 5U for 92 SFF/LFF drives. Each FlashSystem 9100 can support up to 760 drives. These expansion drawers are not NVMe, so the Solid-State Drives (SSD) inside them use standard SAS. Consider using Easy Tier sub-LUN automated tiering to move fast data up to the FCM/ISN drives, and slower data to these SAS-based SSD.

Even though it doesn't have a "V" in its name, the FlashSystem 9100 runs Spectrum Virtualize, so you can also virtualize other storage behind it. Over 400 different storage devices from leading storage vendors are supported. The FlashSystem 9100 can be virtualized behind SVC or FlashSystem V9000.

FlashSystem 9100 can also cluster with Gen2 and Gen2+ models of the Storwize V7000 and V7000F controllers. You can connect up to four of any of these into a single cluster, supporting up to 3,040 drives.

The FlashSystem 9100 offers all of the features you have come to love from the rest of the Spectrum Virtualize products: data deduplication and compression, encryption, high-availability guarantee, data footprint reduction guarantee, hardware refresh option after three years, storage utility pricing, and IBM Storage Insights support.

IBM has no plans to withdraw either the existing FlashSystem V9000 nor the Storwize V7000/F models anytime soon. They continue to be available for purchase.

To learn more, see [IBM FlashSystem 9100] announcement letter, and fellow blogger Barry Whyte's post [Introducing the FlashSystem 9100 NVMe with FCM].

IBM FlashSystem 9100 Multi-Cloud solutions

To complement the hardware features of the FlashSystem 9100, IBM has come up with three Multi-cloud solutions.

• Multi-Cloud Solution for Data Reuse, Protection and Efficiency - this combines Spectrum CDM with Spectrum Protect Plus to take snapshots of volumes on FlashSystem 9100. These snapshots are not just for data protection, but can also be "reused" for other purposes, like dev/test, DevOPS, or analytics.
• Multi-Cloud Solution for Business Continuity and Data Reuse - combines Spectrum CDM with Spectrum Virtualize in the Public Cloud, allowing you to take snapshots to the IBM Cloud for disaster recovery. The snapshots can be used in the cloud, or copied back to the same or different data center.
• Multi-Cloud Solution for Private Cloud Flexibility and Data Protection - combines IBM Cloud Private, Spectrum CDM, and Spectrum Connect to support client's efforts to re-factor their applications with Docker containers and Kubernetes. IBM FlashSystem 9100 can be used as persistent storage for containerized applications.

To learn more, see [IBM Multi-Cloud solutions] announcement letter.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize 8.2 release

This release applies only to the Storwize V7000/F and the new FlashSystem 9100 models, and provides support for iSCSI Extensions over RDMA (iSER) on the 25GbE NIC cards. If you want to cluster existing Storwize V7000/F models to the new FlashSystem 9100 models, you need all of them to be at least v8.2.0 release.

Lower latencies and higher bandwidth requirements can be addressed by using RDMA to implement iSCSI. iSER is a new interconnect protocol that allows iSCSI to run on top of RDMA technology. RDMA can be implemented by using RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) or iWARP (Internet Wide-area RDMA Protocol). iSER enables iSCSI to run on top of it regardless of which of these technologies is used underneath.

To learn more, see [ IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software V8.2] announcement letter.

IBM Storage Utility Pricing

The "Storage Utility" pricing available for many of IBM's other products has been extended to include the IBM FlashSystem 9100 and IBM Cloud Object Storage.

Basically, this is a variable-priced usage-based lease. Let's say you lease 500TB of capacity, but only use 150TB, the first few months you only pay for 150TB, a bit later, you use more, and now start paying more monthly, say 200TB. The price can go up or down. At the end of the lease, typically 36 or 60 months, you have a choice: give the equipment back, or pay the difference.

To learn more, see [IBM Storage Utility offerings for IBM Cloud Object Storage] announcement letter.

IBM is pleased to be on the leading edge of NVMe technology!

technorati tags: FlashSystem 9100, Multi-Cloud, Spectrum Virtualize