This piece looks at a number of recent announcements concerning digital storage and memory for data center and cloud applications, including IBM’s latest Elastic Storage Announcement and cloud file storage from Google and LucidLink. It also talks about Intel Optane storage systems announced by Lenovo and StorOne.
IBM made some new storage announcements geared to help you with your big data analytics and AI applications. IBM says that the AI journey starts by accelerating your ability to collect and organize data, gaining deeper insights by leveraging AI-driven data analysis and then infusing your entire enterprise with these capabilities and insights. IBM’s latest storage announcements are geared to help create high-performance, cost-efficient AI solutions intended to provide greater insight, value and competitive advantage from data. IBM also says that their new solutions can be installed in minutes.
These storage solutions include the new ESS 5000 and the ESS 3000 (introduced in October 2019), which together with Spectrum Scale and Spectrum Discover Software provide an effective path from data ingest to data insights as shown below.
IBM’s Elastic Storage System (ESS) 5000 generally available (GA) on August 7, 2020 runs IBM’s Spectrum Scale software and provides a vast data lake scalable to yottabyte configurations (a yottabyte is a 1,000 Zetabytes) providing up to 55 GB/s performance in a single 8-HDD enclosure node. The ESS 3000 is a 2U enclosure with 40 GB/s performance and can be used to provide fast analysis of large amounts of storage. IBM is currently using 14 and 16 TB HDDs from Seagate.
As shown in the figure above IBM Cloud Object Storage can provide cost-efficient on-premises and hybrid cloud object storage from any network location. The recent announcement increase IBM’s Cloud Object Storage applications from backup and archive to potentially supporting faster AI data collection and integration with high performance AI, big data and HPC workflows.
The IBM COS storage engine is upgraded to increase system performance to 55 GB/s in a 12-node configuration, leading to significant improvement in read and write speeds, accelerating the collection and accessing of object data. IBM COS also supports shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs, increasing the storage capacity of these drives compared to conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDDs. IBM’s Spectrum Discover provides file and object data cataloging and indexing during ingests and exports of data.
Google Cloud announced new file storage offerings with its beta of Filestore High Scale, which includes Elastifile’s scale-out file storage capability. There are other announcements coming from Google from their virtual event, Cloud Next ’20: OnAir. Some highlights of the Filestore tier is that it allows deploying shared file systems that can scale-out to hundreds of thousands of IOPS, 10s of GB/s throughput and 100’s of TB of storage capacity. To support advanced security requirements the launch adds beta support for NFS IP-based access controls to the Filestore tiers.
LucidLink also announced a Cloud NAS that embeds into any OS as a file system and presents everything as if it is a local file with the client handling all encryption, data compression, pre-fetching and caching with the cloud object store treated as an infinitely scalable block device. The company’s LucidLink Service manages metadata coordination across users, garbage collection, global Locking and other functions. The image below shows the operation of this cloud NAS platform.
There have been a few more storage system announcements that include Intel’s Optane memory (both the NVMe SSDs and the DIMM versions) as an option in the last few weeks. StorONE announced its all-flash array.next (AFAn) that combine intel’s Optane NVMe SSDs with Intel QLC 3D NAND SSDs, see picture below. Data is moved between the two storage tiers as it ages. The system is powered by StorONE’s S1 storage software for traditional data centers. CompuTech International (CTI) is the distributor of the StorONE’s S1:AFAn.
Lenovo’s Data Center Group (DCG) announced the launch of its ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 servers that feature third generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with support for Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series and new remote deployment service offerings for the ThinkSystem DM7100 storage systems.
IBM announced new HDD and SSD storage systems and software for creating advanced AI applications that encompass data on premises and in the cloud. Google also announced a scale-out cloud file storage and LucidLink has a Cloud NAS. New uses for SSD and DIMM based Optane announced from StorOne and Lenovo.