How IBM FlashSystem 9100 Help Indian Clients

Today, we see the need for data-driven businesses reflected in some of the most powerful trends currently driving enterprise data storage: Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), artificial intelligence, multi-cloud, containers and more. IBM believes that there is only one kind of successful enterprise – the data-driven multi-cloud organization.

Now the question arises: “Is there a storage solution available that addresses today’s storage, data center, and cloud trends within a single platform; with an extensive AI and cloud-centric software portfolio, that supports both traditional and modern data centers?”

The answer is yes – IBM FlashSystem 9100.

The newly-announced FlashSystem 9100 all-flash arrays are flexible, modern, agile, and NVMe-optimized storage systems built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize and IBM FlashCore technologies.

FlashSystem 9100 fundamentally encompasses from a hardware and software perspective is one of the first of its kind in the industry that is based on NVMe flash storage. If one looks at traditional flash storage, which industry calls Solid State Drives, which are prone to failure while they may not be spinning, the amount of error rates are also visibly high. This one is completely based on what we call non-volatile memory. The second element, which goes into this product and solution, is the software-defined storage, which is our Spectrum Virtualization Software. The third is the IBM FlashCore technology. The combination of these three, intersection or culmination point of all these three is primarily driving the digital trend. The data reuse protection, the business continuity, and multi-cloud kind of a flexibility.

This innovation can be leveraged across all industries especially for consolidation and deployment of multi-cloud architectures. Specifically, in India, we would be offering utility-based storage pricing models for handling the multi-cloud deployments," said Viswanath Ramaswamy, Director - Systems (India/South Asia).

Advantages for Indian Clients:

"The Flash 9100 can run in any environment. For the first time, we have done a hardware, based accelerated compression. Most of our clients are going towards data-driven multi-cloud enterprise, storage is by far growing at a very rampant pace and clients are looking for more efficient ways of storing data. It is not that you keep buying petabytes and petabytes of storage, store it in one place, and then do a backup, which is a very inefficient way of buying the storage solution for the growth of the data, which is being driven. It has to be a combination of, how do I make it more efficient, what all can it back up on the cloud and at the same time not compromise on the performance also," said Viswanath.

Today clients use reuse data for maximizing agility. They take a lot of copies, orchestrate the copies, maximize the snapshots which are typically done in a storage. Now it either can be packed up for a backup on the cloud or can take a backup in the public cloud or on-premises, and that is an inbuilt feature in the Flash 9100. This is attributed to our software-defined storage.

"Many of these combinations are really helping us. In addition, we don’t need to have the copy of your backup, specifically for DevOps and analytics and reporting. You do not need to have the copies of the data residing on-premises, you could always have the copies on a public cloud. You could then recover those applications either on any of the public cloud services provided. You can easily shorten the workloads and capacities between an on-premise or a public or a private cloud. You can juggle around, reuse, and shift the data to maintain business continuity, he further added.

IBM’s Roadmap for India

Viswanath said that  "we are leaders in terms of Flash; we are leaders in our software-defined storage in terms of our Spectrum offerings. Year after year, we see constant growth on these two technologies because this is what clients are really resonating. From a business plan perspective, we are looking at more and more revenues and client acquisitions to come in from across all segments. We cannot really say that telecom is big, or banking is big because storage is pervasive. These two will be our flagship, leadership technologies which we plan to take it forward, increase our wallet share, and become clearly a dominant player in the market from a leadership position into a dominant position

The second piece is in terms of creating a strong partner ecosystem, and a strong channel ecosystem to drive these technologies. On one end of the spectrum, you have the low-range, low-cost storage, that is the run rate model, which is the primarily driven through our channel and partners, from across all the ecosystem providers. That will be our go to market plan, which will be autonomous in nature. That itself we have come out with lots of exciting programs, especially for our channel partners and our ecosystem partners that drive these technologies of storage. That has created a lot of buzz and excitement, which is what we want to translate into a good amount of revenues that incline our position."