New IBM DS8000 Storage Solution Ups the Ante in Availability
Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage, explains the significance and inner workings of the 10th generation DS8000
The impending release of a new IBM storage product marks another step forward in the asymptotic journey toward 100% availability.
Among other advances, IBM is promising up to eight 9s of availability (99.999999%) in its 10th-generation DS8000 enterprise-class storage solution, announced last month. That’s up from five 9s, which was the standard “for many moons,” says Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage.
The DS8000 boasts improvements in security, storage density and transaction times as well—important factors in industries like finance, insurance, retail and healthcare that handle transactions at massive scale. “Performance is always, always critical if you are processing that amount of transactions,” Kennelly says. “I mean, how quickly you can process transactions has a direct impact on wealth and wealth creation, et cetera.”
Faster Transaction Times
IBM claims a 2.5x improvement in transaction times with the new DS8000, thanks to ZHyperlink, a direct connection between the mainframe and storage that can bypass competing traffic on the storage area network. This kind of integration sets the new DS8000 apart, according to Kennelly. “I know this from talking to customers: When they compare us to other devices, the way we’ve integrated that with the mainframe is really, really unique,” he says.
Doubled Storage Capacity
While transaction times are shrinking with the new DS8000, capacity is growing. The system’s Flash Core Module 4 marks “a really critical innovation,” Kennelly says, “because it gives you effectively double the storage for the same footprint.”
The new module includes both storage and compute within the flash drive, enabling data compression within the device itself thanks to several ARM processors. “We have used these previously on our distributed storage line, but now we’re bringing them into the mainframe, and that gives us an automatic bump on capacity,” Kennelly says.
GDPS Enables New Heights for Availability
Those three additional decimal places represented by eight 9s of availability may not add up to much in terms of human-scale time, but they can mean a lot to large companies that rely on IBM Z infrastructure, Kennelly notes. For them, he says, “seconds of downtime have a material impact.”
And how, exactly, does the DS8000 achieve this enhanced availability? “The only way you can do that is there is a very tight interchange between the mainframe and something we call GDPS,” or Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex, which facilitates data writing on two devices that can be located nearby, across a metro area, or even farther apart.
“If somebody literally picks up an ax or drives a forklift through one of those devices, the other device takes over automatically and there is no application impact. That’s how you get the eight 9s of availability. It’s completely seamless,” Kennelly says.
Data availability is ensured by immutable safeguarded copies, notes the press release announcing the new DS8000. This involves copying data from the mainframe at a set frequency and requiring dual authentication to access the copy, meaning two individuals with separate credentials must be physically present at the machine to unlock the data.
“You can’t actually touch the copy that we’ve made. You can copy the copy and put it on another volume and then bring up another system,” Kennelly explains.
Storage Still a Priority
The new DS8000 will be generally available Oct. 25, marking a continued focus on storage at IBM, even if it’s not the technology category that’s received all the attention recently.
“It continues to be an area that we invest very heavily in as a company and continue to innovate,” Kennelly says. “When you look at tech companies, everybody’s got to talk about AI or cloud or hybrid cloud, but underneath all that, storage is very critical to IBM.”