IBM’s solution to AI storage problems

Monday, 20 November 2023

With everyone talking about AI these days, IBM announced, at the end of October, a storage solution to the problem of where to put your data intensive and AI workload demands. Drum roll please, we have the new IBM Storage Scale System 6000, a cloud-scale global data platform.

The product has an enhanced high-performance parallel file system designed for data intensive use-cases. It provides up to 7M Input/output operations per second (IOPs) and up to 256GB/s throughput for read-only workloads per system in a 4U (four rack units) footprint.

Denis Kennelly, general manager, IBM Storage, is quoted in the press release as saying, “The potential of today’s new era of AI can only be fully realized, in my opinion, if organizations have a strategy to unify data from multiple sources in near real-time without creating numerous copies of data and going through constant iterations of data ingest. IBM Storage Scale System 6000 gives clients the ability to do just that – brings together data from core, edge, and cloud into a single platform with optimized performance for GPU (graphics processing unit) workloads.”

We’re told that the IBM Storage Scale System 6000 is optimized for storing semi-structured and unstructured data including video, imagery, text, instrumentation data, etc, that is generated daily and accelerates an organization’s digital footprint across hybrid environments. With the IBM Storage Scale System clients can expect greater data efficiencies and economies of scale with the addition of IBM FlashCore Modules (FCM), to be incorporated in the first half of 2024:

• New maximum capacity nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) FCM will provide capacity efficiency with 70% lower cost and 53% less energy per TB compared with IBM’s previous maximum capacity flash drives for IBM Storage Scale System. This can help clients realize the full performance of NVMe with the cost advantages of Quad-level Cell (QLC).
• Powerful inline hardware-accelerated data compression and encryption to help keep client data secured even in multi-user, multi-tenant environments.
• Storage Scale System 6000 with FCM will support 2.5 times the amount of data in the same floor space than the previous generation system.

In addition, clients can accelerate the adoption and operationalization (is there such a word?) of AI workloads with IBM watsonx:

• Engineered with a new NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) turbo tier, new parallel multi-tenant data isolation and IBM patented computational storage drives, this is designed to provide more performance security and efficiency for AI workloads.
• Storage Scale software, the global data platform for unstructured data that powers the Scale System 6000, connects data with an open ecosystem of multi-vendor storage options including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, and other public clouds, in addition to IBM Storage Tape.

Lastly, they say, clients can gain faster access to data with over 2.5 times the GB/s throughput and double IOPs performance of market leading competitors. It provides high-processing throughput and access speed with multiple concurrent AI and data-intensive workloads that can be run to meet a range of use cases.

IBM certainly seems to have set the bar quite high for its competitors to try to beat, while at the same time offering a product that is going to be useful to organizations looking to increase their use of AI and needing the capacity and speed to do so.

If you need anything written, contact Trevor Eddolls at iTech-Ed.
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