#IBM Tuesday expanded its #allflash storage line with a new offering targeting big data and other unstructured data applications.
The new IBM #DeepFlash150, which is scheduled to start shipping late this week, is aimed at the types of applications that require capabilities not found on standard all-flash storage solutions, said Alex Chen, IBM's director of storage systems and offering executive for file and #objectstorage.
The majority of all-flash storage arrays are focused on more traditional applications such as virtual desktop infrastructure, block storage and on-line transaction processing, Chen told CRN.
"Analysts tell us 80 percent of data is unstructured," he said. " #Bigdata is a different problem for flash storage. With big data, data is measured in petabytes, not terabytes. And unstructured data is growing twice as quickly as structured data. So scalability is a big factor."
Big data and other unstructured data also require low-cost storage, Chen said. "A lot of unstructured data like videos is already compressed, so it's hard to count on data reduction to save capacity," he said.
For that reason, the IBM DeepFlash 150 is based on a different architecture than IBM's current FlashCore-based all-flash arrays, Chen said.
IBM, Armonk, N.Y., said the new offering has a price of about $1 per GB. Chen did say that many vendors, including IBM, already have all-flash solutions at that price point. "But the others, including the IBM solutions, include compression and deduplication, which don't work with unstructured data," he said.
The IBM DeepFlash 150 is based on a 3U chassis, each of which can be configured with 128 TB to 512 TB of capacity. When combined with IBM's Spectrum Scale software for file, object and integrated data analytics, the IBM DeepFlash 150 can scale to multiple exabytes of capacity, Chen said.
Combining the two as a complete solution will help customers and channel partners with workloads such as in-memory analytics, media and entertainment, real-time analytics, high-performance computing, life sciences and genomics, he said.
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