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IBM Announces Major Innovations Across Its Storage Portfolio

IBM announces a plan to launch new container-native SDS solution IBM Spectrum Fusion and introduces updates to the IBM Elastic Storage System family

Today, April 27, 2021, IBM announced key innovations across the storage portfolio, designed for improving access to, and management of, data across hybrid cloud environments. 

First, the company announced a plan to launch a new container-native software defined storage (SDS) solution, IBM Spectrum Fusion, in the second half of 2021. The first incarnation is planned to come in the form of a container-native hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) system. When released, Spectrum Fusion will integrate compute, storage and networking into a single solution. It’s being designed to come equipped with Red Hat OpenShift, enabling organizations to support environments for virtual machines and containers while providing SDS for cloud, edge and containerized data centers. In early 2022, IBM plans to release an SDS-only version.

In addition, IBM introduced updates to its IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS) family of high-performance solutions that are highly scalable and designed for easy deployment. Today’s launch of new IBM ESS models and updates, all of which are available now, include: 
  • Global Data Boost: The IBM ESS 3200, a new 2U storage solution that is designed to provide data throughput of 80 GB/second per node—a 100% read performance boost from its predecessor, the ESS 3000. Also adding to its performance, the 3200 supports up to 8 InfiniBand HDR-200 or Ethernet-100 ports for high throughput and low latency. The system can also provide up to 367TB of storage capacity per 2U node. 
  • Packing on the Petabytes: The IBM ESS 5000 model has been updated to support 10% more density than previously available for a total storage capacity of 15.2PB. In addition, all ESS systems are now equipped with streamlined containerized deployment capabilities automated with the latest version of Red Hat Ansible. 
Stay tuned for more TechChannel coverage, where IBM’s Eric Herzog will weigh in on this latest storage announcement. Coming soon!
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