… Storage Roadmap …

IBM Corp. intends to support a number of enhancements to a variety of storage systems in the future. These enhancements will leverage research on intelligent algorithms, automation, and virtualization that is being incorporated into products in the its storage portfolio. The statements of direction highlighted here intended to provide a glimpse into the company’ storage roadmap for selected product capabilities.

The company intends to deliver:

• Advanced Easy Tier capabilities on selected storage systems, including the DS8000, designed to leverage direct-attached solid state storage on selected AIX and Linux servers. Easy Tier will manage the solid-state storage as a large and low latency cache for the hottest data, while preserving advanced disk system functions, such as RAID protection and remote mirroring.
• An application-aware storage API to help deploy storage more efficiently by enabling applications and middleware to direct more optimal placement of data by communicating important information about current workload activity and application performance requirements.
• A new high-density flash storage module for selected disk systems, including the DS8000. The new module will accelerate performance with cost-effective, high-density SSDs.

The company intends to extend
IBM Active Cloud Engine capabilities to:

• Allow files on selected NAS devices to be virtualized by SONAS and Storwize V7000 Unified. Virtualization capabilities provide access across a unified global namespace, while facilitating transparent file migrations in parallel with normal operations. This capability will help provide customer investment protection as clients continue to leverage their existing NAS assets while exploiting the capabilities of IBM Active Cloud Engine .
• Enable file collaboration globally via Active Cloud Engine. This capability will help enhance productivity where users at geographically dispersed locations can both share and modify the same file.

The company intends to deliver Cloud features
to SONAS and Storwize V7000 Unified to support:

• Web Storage Services, a standard-based object store and API that implements the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard from Storage Networking Industry Association to support the implementation of storage cloud services.
• Self-service portal designed to speed storage provisioning, monitoring, and reporting.

The company intends to support an increased scalability of capacity, performance, and host bandwidth by clustering XIV Gen3 systems together and providing the capability to migrate volumes across the cluster without disrupting applications. Management of the cluster will remain simple with consolidated views and shared configurations across the systems. These capabilities are intended to help clients address the scalability and management requirements for cloud computing.

The company intends to extend NAS data retention enhancements for Storwize V7000 Unified and SONAS to provide file ‘immutability’ to help support file integrity from the time the file is designated as immutable through its lifecycle. Immutability is intended to secure files from inadvertent or malicious change or deletion.

The company intends to enable Real-time Compression for block and file workloads on Storwize V7000. This enhancement is designed to help clients experience the same high-performance compression for active primary block and file workloads on V7000 that is being announced for block workloads on V7000. Real-time Compression is designed to deliver enhanced storage efficiency with potential benefits including lower storage acquisition cost (because of the ability to purchase less hardware), reduced storage growth, and lower rack space, power, and cooling requirements.