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IBM and SanDisk collaborate on all-flash storage solution
Wed, 2nd Mar 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

SanDisk and IBM are collaborating to deliver software-defined all-flash storage solutions for the data center. The joint solution of software-defined all-flash storage addresses the escalating data center challenges of scale, performance, agility and break-through economics, according to the duo.

At the core of the collaboration is SanDisk's InfiniFlash System - a high-capacity and extreme-performance flash-based software defined storage system featuring IBM Spectrum Scale filesystem.

As bi-modal IT, traditional and cloud native applications become social, mobile and real-time, IT groups must address the mounting pressure to deliver best-of-breed storage, SanDisk says.

The InfiniFlash for IBM Spectrum Scale Solution is a scale-out, ultra-dense system combined with IBM Spectrum Scale and allows private, hybrid and public cloud customers to enable Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) starting small and growing to multiple petabytes, according to the company.

InfiniFlash delivers cost per IOPS/TB and the ability to scale compute and storage independently. It also delivers high reliability and low failure rate of flash, resulting in capex and opex savings, according to SanDisk. The joint flash storage solution will address use cases such as clustered scale-out high performance NAS, Big Data In-Place analytics and OpenStack for files, the company says.

The SanDisk InfiniFlash is a next-generation storage platform created by SanDisk and IBM Spectrum Scale is a software-defined, distributed, parallel filesystem, for high performance, large scale workloads on-premises or in the cloud.

“Our initiative with IBM brings the best of both worlds to data centers: breakthrough economics compared to traditional all-flash array deployments, and dramatically higher performance, improved reliability and lower power consumption compared to hard disk drive-based arrays,” says Ravi Swaminathan, SanDisk vice president and general manager, System and Software Solutions.

“These offerings enable customers to economically deploy flash at petabyte-scale, which drive business growth through new services and offerings for their end-customers.

“The market-leading combination of IBM Spectrum Scale and SanDisk's InfiniFlash solution delivers key differentiators for our mutual clients' applications and workloads,” says Eric Herzog, IBM Storage Systems Division vice president product marketing and management.

“These solutions will be designed to break new ground and make 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.

“Next-Gen applications demand storage services which are high-performance, cost-effective, elastic and agile while providing break-through capex and opex,” says Ashish Nadkarni, IDC Enterprise Servers and Storage programme director.

“This joint solution between SanDisk and IBM that combines an all-flash storage array with a software-defined storage software effectively addresses the changing needs of the data center," Nadkarni says.