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IBM plugs SanDisk's flashy JBOF rig into its spectrum

InfiniFlash gets Big Blue Spectrum Scale integration

IBM and SanDisk are jointly adding Big Blue’s parallel filesystem software Spectrum Scale to SanDisk’s InfiniFlash all-flash array.

Spectrum Scale, formerly known as GPFS, is a mature and well-used parallel file system, that IBM has been continually updating to keep it current.

SanDisk’s InfiniFlash is a 3U enclosure with half a petabyte of flash inside it and a need for software to run it - it being like a flash JBOD - and partners to sell it. So far CloudBytes, Nexenta, SuperMicro and Tegile have stepped up to do just that.

Tegile’s IntelliFlash HD storage array, using the SanDisk hardware, is now available worldwide, with Tegile saying it delivers “up to 5 million IOPS and 10PB of effective capacity in a single rack at under 50 cents per effective GB -- an unheard of price for companies moving to flash storage.”

It also says future versions of IntelliFlash HD will have both scale-up and scale-out controllers for sustained low-latency and performance at high scale.

So, back to IBM, with it and SanDisk saying the joint product addresses the “escalating data center challenges of scale, performance, agility and break-through economics,” allowing customers to offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

The InfiniFlash for IBM Spectrum Scale product is targeted at clustered scale-out high performance NAS, Big Data In-Place analytics and OpenStack for files applications. They say the cost levels are compelling; with software stacks that offer data reduction schemes, the effective cost/GB goes down to unprecedented levels, such as $0.20/GB based on a 5X data reduction factor.

Ravi Swaminathan, VP and GM for System and Software Solutions at SanDisk, had a canned quote: “These offerings enable customers to economically deploy flash at petabyte-scale, which drive business growth through new services and offerings for their end-customers.”

Not to be outdone, Eric Herzog, IBM Storage Systems Division VP for product marketing and management, said the joint product makes ”all-flash storage exceedingly cost-effective for a wide range of use cases, from high-performance databases to virtualised environments to big data oceans to extra-dense active archive repositories and more.”

There you have it, high-performing, big data ocean swimming, virtualising, archive repository-ing folks: apply Spectrum Scale and InfiniFlash to your storage and data IO needs.

Find out more about it and the IBM/SanDisk collaboration at this SanDisk blog. It says the joint product “is promoted directly to customers and delivered by select channel partners (SIs/VARs), who already deliver IBM Spectrum Family and SanDisk products.”

Tegile, by the way, has released its T3500, a new entry-level all-flash array for use by smaller customers. ®

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