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IBM on Wednesday unveiled enhancements to several of its storage products in order to increase scalability and automation while easing cost and management concerns about ever-growing storage capacities.
The new enhancements to IBM's existing disk and tape storage products are coming at a time when businesses continue to look for ways to handle issues related to the cost and management of non-stop data growth, said Clod Barrera, distinguished engineer and chief technical strategist for IBM storage.
IBM's approach is to improve the scalability of its storage technology while adding new automation features to help better manage a company's data, Barrera said.
"We're moving to a scale-out architecture, an architecture that can grow with low-cost building blocks that address cost issues with no limits to capacity," he said.
For primary storage, IBM is adding a new technology, Easy Tier, that automates the migration of data to SSDs in its System Storage DS8000 disk arrays.
IBM has had an SSD option with its DS8000 for about a year to handle data for the most performance-intensive requirements, but migrating the data to SSDs has been a manual process, Barrera said.
With Easy Tier, the migration of data between the slower spinning disk and the high-speed SSDs is automated. The technology observes access of data on a very granular basis, and automatically moves most-accessed data to the SSDs, he said.
IBM also introduced 2-TB hard drives for its enterprise-class XIV storage arrays, effectively doubling capacity to 161 TB of usable capacity per standard rack, Barrera said.
