IBM storage is proud to introduce our new twins, FlashSystem A9000 and FlashSystem A9000R, affectionately known as pod and rack respectively. The twins come from the loving family created by the marriage of FlashSystem (hometown Houston, Texas, USA) and XIV (hometown Tel Aviv, Israel). The twins share the same DNA but have taken on completely different appearances and capabilities.
I have to say, as a member of one of the proud parent teams, the last two years have been a real eye opening experience. Any major system release is an exercise in coordination and collaboration, and this one crossed many time zones and cultures, to say nothing of merging technologies. The marriage of these two groups involved integration of offering management, product marketing, marketing, technical sales, sales, support, development, testing, and sales enablement.
As a quick refresher, IBM acquired XIV in 2008 and Texas Memory Systems (now referred to as FlashSystem) in 2012. XIV’s claim to fame was taking the world’s least reliable disk technology (SATA HDDs) and packaging them into a highly reliable, scalable, and high performance enterprise storage solution. The Texas Memory Systems and FlashSystem claim to fame involved extracting the lowest possible latency from solid state storage media in a shared storage solution. It is obvious why these two solutions would be merged together, isn’t it?
OK, so maybe it isn’t that obvious, so I will explain. Over two years ago, we were looking to the future and envisioning a world where solutions for the cloud service provider market took on increasing importance. The vision really crystallized in 2013 when IBM acquired SoftLayer. As with any initiative of this sort, IBM went through a buy vs build analysis. With the acquisition of Texas Memory Systems only having been recently closed, buying another all-flash array provider was not likely. A quick look across the storage stacks available from within IBM revealed some great options: the software behind IBM SAN Volume Controller, the software behind XIV, and what we now refer to as Spectrum Scale. We were looking for some key features: scalability, because we knew cloud service providers need to be able to grow with their customer base; quality-of-service so that our customers can prevent noisy neighbor problems in multi-tenant environments; multi-tenant management so that those tenants could manage their own logical component of the system; and critically, a team (the people) with the experience and resources to implement full-time data reduction so that we could help cloud service providers lower the cost of their all-flash deployments. When you put it all together, it was obvious that our best match was with the XIV software (and team). XIV, for years, had led IBM’s focus on cloud integration points, including many of the key features mentioned above plus strong links to cloud orchestration solutions from Microsoft, VMware, and OpenStack.
Leaving out the details, suffice it to say there have been many IBMers crossing the Atlantic and Mediterranean in order to bring these new members of our product family to market.
But the strength of the family is not just the individuals…it’s in the family itself and here is where our marriage makes even more sense. As much as we can see the future through our all-flash lenses, it is abundantly clear that customers will take a variety of paths and differing amounts of time to get there. Our combined family includes a true software defined storage capability in Spectrum Accelerate, a capacity-optimized solution with XIV, and a performance solution with the FlashSystem A9000 twins. In addition to sharing a software lineage, these products actually can share licensing. A customer testing the waters with this family could start with a trial deployment of Spectrum Accelerate, then actually buy software licenses on a per capacity basis for Spectrum Accelerate. Those software licenses are then transferable to XIV for low cost capacity and to FlashSystem A9000 for dynamic performance with full time data reduction. In the near future, customers will be able to asynchronously replicate from a FlashSystem A9000 to an XIV, enabling additional cost cutting for disaster recovery deployments.
It’s been quite journey, literally, getting these two new products to market. But now that they’ve arrived, please join us in welcoming the twins to our growing FlashSystem family!
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