IBM Said to Sell More All-Flash Arrays in 2014 Than Any Competitor

IBM Corp. announced it was the number one all-flash storage array vendor in 2014, shipping more petabytes and units for SSA than any other competitor, according to data in a new report by IT analyst firm Gartner, Inc.

Companies around the globe are turning to IBM and its flash storage solutions for faster access to data-driven insights. In 2014 alone, IBM sold more than 2,100 FlashSystems, totaling 62PB of capacity, 33% of the total all-flash petabyte capacity for the year, and 82% more than the closest competitive product. (Source: Market Share: Disk Storage Systems, All Regions, 4Q14 Update, Table 12, May, 2015.

In its market share analysis, SSDs and Solid-State Arrays Worldwide Report for 2014, by Joseph Unsworth and John Monroe, published May 1, 2015, Gartner identified IBM as the number one worldwide solid-state array vendor in unit shipments and petabytes delivered for 2014.

“With over a third of the world’s 2014 all-flash array capacity on IBM FlashSystem, this solution is proving itself as the all-flash enterprise storage solution of choice across Tier 1 enterprise and cloud deployments around the world,” said Michael Kuhn, VP and business line executive, IBM enterprise storage. “Companies understand the benefits of high-speed data access and don’t want to keep their customers waiting as they access their critical data, whether via a web commerce page or a banking application or patient healthcare record.”

With new FlashSystem solutions, clients can deploy an all-flash enterprise storage solution for less than $2 a gigabyte of effective storage, making the price of all-flash systems as cost-effective, or even less expensive, than arrays with enterprise high-performance spinning disks. As a result, FlashSystem is helping companies move their mission critical applications to all-flash storage arrays. By lowering the price barrier, FlashSystem is becoming more pervasive in storage environments of data intensive industries such as healthcare, financial services and retail. In addition to being able to meet the rapid-fire demands of data-intensive applications, companies adopting FlashSystem are also recording savings in energy, space and IT administration costs.

IP-Only AB is a Swedish internet and telecoms operator that owns its own Nordic fiber infrastructure, metro area networks, data centers and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. Its customers include telecoms operators, communications- intensive companies, financial institutions and media companies.

“FlashSystem helps IP-Only cut costs by reducing the need to deploy new physical servers as the virtual landscape grows,” said Christian Pallinder, senior solutions architect, IP-Only AB. “The impact of FlashSystem exceeded our expectations, enabling us to run around three times more VMs per physical server. Effectively, the solution paid for itself immediately. Using FlashSystem, we reduced report processing time from six hours to four minutes without any code change. This technology helps our business get faster analytical insight and respond more quickly to new demands.”

In February, IBM launched two new, powerful all-flash storage solutions built on its FlashCore technology, a suite of innovations and capabilities that enable FlashSystem to provide performance and efficiency, along with reliability and enterprise data services to help lower costs and accelerate data-intensive applications and infrastructures for both traditional enterprise and cloud. The new solutions, FlashSystem V9000 and FlashSystem 900, provide customers real-time analytical insights with up to 50 times better performance than traditional enterprise storage.