IBM recently unveiled “Elastic Storage,” a virtualized portfolio of “software-defined” storage products aimed to decrease data center costs by as much as 90 percent.
Elastic Storage is IBM’s answer to the dramatic expansion of data volumes. It is intended to work with any company’s storage systems and gives users access to any type of data, across all of an enterprise storage system in multiple locations, according to a May 12 press release issued by IBM.
Developed in IBM’s Research Labs, Elastic Storage treats storage arrays as a collective resource that can be split into virtual systems to serve application requirements. A key benefit, according to IBM, is that it can automatically move less-used data from across a whole pool of capacity into less expensive commodity storage, leaving faster and more expensive resources for urgently needed data. This automatic reshuffling is guided by policies and real-time analytics and provides efficiencies and cost savings of up to 90 percent, according to IBM.
At its core, Elastic Storage builds on IBM’s global file system software to provide online storage management, scalable access and integrated data governance tools capable of managing vast amounts of data and billions of files. For example, Elastic Storage also impacts server-side Flash with up to a six-time increase in performance than with standard SAS disks. This feature recognizes when a server has Flash storage and automatically uses that Flash as cache memory to improve performance.
Contact Sirius to speak with one of our storage experts about storage virtualization solutions.
Viv Perry is a Corporate Communications Specialist with Sirius Computer Solutions.
