SanDisk & IBM Collaborate to Deliver Software-Defined All-Flash Storage Solutions

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, and IBM announced a collaboration to bring out a unique class of next-generation, software-defined, all-flash storage solutions for the data center. At the core of this collaboration are SanDisk’s InfiniFlash System—a high-capacity and extreme-performance flash-based software defined storage system featuring  IBM Spectrum Scale filesystem from IBM. The joint solution of software-defined all-flash storage addresses the escalating datacenter challenges of scale, performance, agility and break-through economics.

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. TheInfiniFlash 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) by starting small and growing to multiple petabytes. InfiniFlash delivers best-in-class cost per IOPS/TB and the ability to scale compute and storage independently, while delivering the high reliability and low failure rate of flash, resulting in breakthrough capex and opex savings. 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.

SanDisk InfiniFlash

Award-winning SanDisk InfiniFlash is a next-generation storage platform created by SanDisk offering 5x the density, 50x the performance and 4x the reliability, while consuming 80 percent less power than traditional hard disk drive (HDD) based arrays. InfiniFlash also delivers breakthrough pricing for an all-flash solution starting at less than $1 per gigabyte (GB) for an all-flash system before the additional effects of compression or de-duplication technologies are considered. With software stacks that offer data reduction schemes, the effective cost/GB goes down even more significantly to unprecedented levels (example: 20 cents/GB based on a 5X data reduction factor).

IBM Spectrum Scale

Award-winning IBM Spectrum Scale is a software-defined, distributed, parallel filesystem, for high performance, large scale workloads on-premises or in the cloud. Featuring the ability to automatically tier data based on application needs, the Spectrum Scale software-defined storage solution provides file, object, and integrated data analytics for:

·              Compute clusters (technical computing)

·              Big data and analytics

·              Cognitive computing

·              Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)

·              Private cloud

·              Content repositories

“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,” said Ravi Swaminathan, vice president and general manager, System and Software Solutions, SanDisk. “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,” said Eric Herzog, vice president product marketing and management, of IBM Storage Systems Division. “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 virtualized 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,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Program Director, Enterprise Servers and Storage at IDC. “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.”