IBM Announces DS8900F Storage Systems & z15

Today IBM Storage announced the new IBM DS9800F storage systems. This all-flash family of arrays brings performance, data protection, resiliency, availability and cost-efficiency to hybrid and multicloud environments while creating a strong synergy between IBM Z mainframes and the cloud. IBM also unveiled z15, its new enterprise platform delivering the ability to manage the privacy of customer data across hybrid multicloud environments. 

Today IBM Storage announced the new IBM DS9800F storage systems. This all-flash family of arrays brings performance, data protection, resiliency, availability and cost-efficiency to hybrid and multicloud environments while creating a strong synergy between IBM Z mainframes and the cloud. IBM also unveiled z15, its new enterprise platform delivering the ability to manage the privacy of customer data across hybrid multicloud environments. 

Designed to match the mission-critical capabilities of IBM Z and LinuxONE servers, the IBM DS8900F family is built with the most advanced POWER9 processors. The DS8900F is the result of deep collaboration between the IBM Storage and IBM Z teams to deliver unique business value for mainframe deployments. The company states that the new storage systems are able to offer transparent hybrid multicloud connectivity for infrastructure simplification, massive capacity, and data protection through the cloud. The new family will replace the DS8880 line. The IBM DS8900F will off a DS8910F model for entry level and the DS8950F that will consolidate all mission-critical storage workloads for IBM Z, IBM LinuxONE, IBM Power Systems, and distributed environments under a single all-flash storage solution.

Benefits of the DS8900F systems include:

• Ultra-low application response times: IBM DS8900F processes huge volumes of IBM Z transactions faster while unlocking the unmatched value for mission critical workloads with storage latencies of 19 microseconds, twice the throughput, and IOPS increased up to 60 percent.
• Secure authentication across trusted systems: Unique IBM technology makes data only accessible by authorized systems. This capability creates a trusted storage network across data centers that encrypts data both in flight and at rest without requiring application changes.
• Maximum system uptime: With more that “seven 9’s” availability and multi-site data replication for disaster recovery, DS8900F provides continuous access to data for mission-critical environments. HyperSwap technology provides no-data-loss capabilities within metro distances, and at more than 1,000 miles, IBM Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex can help recover business operations within 3 to 5 seconds RPO and less than 60 seconds RTO.
• Cyber resilience with Safeguarded Cop: IBM DS8900F prevents user data from being modified or deleted due to user errors, malicious destruction or ransomware attacks with immutable point in time copies of production data and dual management control for increased security.
• Transparent integration to hybrid cloud for IBM Z: IBM DS8900F enables your hybrid multicloud as a new storage tier for backup and archive operations on IBM Z environments with no impact to IO performance and without the need of additional servers or gateways. Transparent Cloud Tiering protects your data with AES-256bit encryption and provides a maximum of 50 percent savings in mainframe CPU utilization when migrating large datasets.

On the security side of things, the new z15 will give clients a greater ability to manage data such as managing who gets access to data via policy-based controls. z15 also grants the ability to instantly revoke access to data across the hybrid cloud. Key benefits include:

• Encryption Everywhere – Building upon pervasive encryption, IBM unveiled new Data Privacy Passports technology that clients can use to gain control over how data is stored and shared – enabling the ability to protect and provision data and revoke access to that data at any time, not only within z15 environment but across an enterprise’s hybrid multicloud environment. z15 also can encrypt data everywhere – across hybrid multicloud environments – to help enterprises secure their data wherever it travels.
• Cloud-Native Development – Gives clients a competitive advantage by evolving how they modernize apps in place, build new cloud-native apps and securely integrate their most important workloads across clouds.
• Instant Recovery – An industry-first approach to limiting the cost and impact of planned and unplanned downtime, enabling users to access full system capacity to accelerate shutdown and restart of IBM Z services and provide a temporary capacity boost to rapidly recover from lost time.

As companies undergo their digital transformation and begin to move more and more of their mission-critical workloads to the cloud, z15 is in a unique position to help with its ability to deliver a hyper-secure, agile and continuously available platform. According to IBM, z15 can process up to 1 trillion web transactions a day, support massive databases, and scale-out to 2.4 million Docker containers in a single z15 system. They go on to state that from a performance perspective, z15 is able to deliver up to 30x lower latency and up to 28x less CPU utilization on z15 by compressing secure web transaction data before encryption using the Integrated Accelerator for z Enterprise Data Compression instead of using software compression.

IBM DS9800F

IBM Z

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