Top Storage Moments in 2019 for IBM

This article was written on a blog posted on January 6, 2020 by Elisa Ortiz Fava, senior manager, storage portfolio marketing, IBM Corp., in the company since 18 years.

2019 was a big year for IBM storage, with a slew of exciting launches of new solutions, fascinating and valuable reports, and deep dives into the ways in which storage can help your organization continue to innovate and drive value from your oceans of data.

But amongst all that great news, what stands out as the best storage moments of 2019? Read on to find out the top ten, presented in no particular order.

1. Storwize V5000 launch
In April, IBM launched the new Storwize V5000 family of offerings to complement Storwize V7000 Gen3. The Storwize V5000 models support end-to-end NVMe and include industry acclaimed IBM Spectrum Virtualize software to provide increased performance and enterprise functionality, availability, and reliability in an easy-to-buy, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage entry storage systems. These models demonstrate the IBM storage commitment to simplify your modern IT and hybrid multicloud infrastructure.

2. DS8900F launch
Designed for mission critical production systems and with strong synergy with IBM Z and the cloud, the new family of AFAs launched in September. The DS8900F provides enhancements in performance, modern data protection, cyber resiliency, availability and cost-efficiency – all of which are demanded in mission-critical hybrid multicloud mainframe environments – with simple and secure support for data to the cloud.

3. Spectrum Discover launch
The launch of IBM Spectrum Discover in July provided tools to help enterprises address the challenges of unstructured data across multiple vendors (IBM, Dell/EMC Isilon, and NetApp), the cloud, and, even, backups. IBM Spectrum Discover provides unified metadata management and insights for file and object storage that can be leveraged for storage optimization, data analytics and AI. With extended support and open APIs, IBM Spectrum Discover delivers insight into an expansive universe of file and object data.

4. IBM storage for Red Hat OpenShift container platform launch
The IBM storage for Red Hat OpenShift container latform, which launched in August, is a reference solution bringing together IBM solutions and open source technologies. IBM storage offers new advantages and benefits for enterprises moving into hybrid multicloud operations, including better security, service orchestration, infrastructure agility, performance, and availability. The IBM storage portfolio supports IBM Cloud Paks as well as standalone applications (including DevOps, database, HPC, analytics and AI workloads).

5. TechQuickie autonomous driving vehicle collaboration
This exciting video from April explains how self-driving cars work, revealing that an individual vehicle can generate up to 15TB of data every hour. Fortunately, IBM Spectrum Storage, automized for AI and ML with GPU-accelerated servers, helps automakers manage all of this data to keep those self-driving cars safely on the road.

6. Elastic Storage System 3000 launch
The launch of the ESS 3000 in October addressed a critical area of emphasis for AI, big data and analytics workloads – the management and storage of unstructured data.

IBM provides solutions for the requirements of AI-driven organizations, addressing every stage of the pipeline from insight to ingest. Leveraging IBM Spectrum Scale, the ESS 3000 is the latest in IBM’s line of high-performance, highly flexible scale-out file system solutions engineered to handle the toughest unstructured data challenges with the ultra-low latency and massive throughput advantages offered by NVMe flash storage.
Read the blog

7. Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant Leader in 4 reports
This year, IBM was honored to be recognized as a leader in four 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant reports: Distributed File Systems and Object Storage; Critical Capabilities for Object Storage; Primary Storage; and Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions.

The Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions (October 2019) was the 8th report in a row where IBM was been recognized for its completeness of vision and its ability to execute in the data protection market, driven by the proven ability to provide a highly scalable, efficient and modern data protection platform that safeguards client’s data.

8. IDC’s 2019 Worldwide Datacenter Support Customer Satisfaction Study Rates IBM #1
In November, IBM took the top in IDC’s 2019 World Datacenter Support Customer Satisfaction Study, which looked at 12 leading vendors and found that support and services are a key differentiator that puts IBM at the head of the pack. It also received the best NPS rating from respondents of any of the storage vendors in the study, excelling in overall support services contract satisfaction, as well was satisfaction with the ease of doing business with the company.

9. IBM storage eBooks
Throughout the year, IBM storage developed resources for enterprises looking to expand their knowledge and capability in various important areas of storage. Subjects covered included AI and big data, cyber resiliency, modern data protection, and NVMe over FC.

10. IT Brand Pulse flash leader for NVMe-of
IT Brand Pulse selected IBM as market leader for the new category of all-flash NVMe-oF array, covering AFAs for block or file storage with NVMe over FC, NVMe over RoCE, or NVMe over TCP interfaces. In addition, it was also named performance leader, reliability leader, service and support leader, and innovation leader (in a tie).