Joint Solution Between SanDisk and IBM

SanDisk Corporation and IBM Corporation announced a collaboration to bring out a 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 flash-based software defined storage system featuring IBM Spectrum Scale filesystem. 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 storage. The InfiniFlash for Spectrum Scale Solution is a scale-out, dense system combined with 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 cost per IO/s/TB and the ability to scale compute and storage independently, while delivering the reliability and low failure rate of flash, resulting in Capex and Opex savings. The joint flash storage solution will address use cases such as clustered scale-out NAS, big data In-Place analytics and OpenStack for files.

InfiniFlash
SanDisk InfiniFlash is a next-generation storage platform offering 5x the density, 50x the performance and 4x the reliability, while consuming 80% less power than traditional HDD drive based arrays. It also delivers pricing for an all-flash solution starting at less than $1/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 (example: 20 cents/GB based on a 5X data reduction factor).

IBM Spectrum Scale
Spectrum Scale is a software-defined, distributed, parallel filesystem, for 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 HDD drive-based arrays,” said Ravi Swaminathan, VP and GM, 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, VP product marketing and management, 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, 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.“

SanDisk’s Systems and Storage Solution portfolio enables the flash-transformed data center through integrated, tested and supported flash solution building blocks for enterprise and cloud workloads, including virtualization, tier-1 databases, big data analytics and digital media repositories, for performance, massive capacity and immediate access to information.