All-Flash Solutions are Redefining Storage in a Multi-Cloud World

July 10, 2018
Written by: Eric Herzog

Companies across every industry are shifting to a multi-cloud environment in order to move faster than their competitors, enhance modern data protection, deliver better customer experiences and drive growth. As they make this essential transition, key trends such as artificial intelligence (AI), containers, and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) are redefining enterprise data storage in the cloud era.

“Thanks to the accelerating rate of business change, enterprises now are realizing how dependent their digital success is on advanced storage technologies — especially advanced technologies that can both support new business models and enhance the value of older infrastructure investments so crucial to sustaining traditional business operations,” said Peter Burris, chief research officer and general manager of Wikibon, SiliconANGLE’s research arm. “Flash storage systems literally are a ‘flash point’ in digital business transformations, enabling unprecedented ‘data-first’ applications like AI, IoT and exceptional business automation.”

With businesses increasingly looking to apply insights from predictive analytics and other AI applications to inform decision-making, they need modern storage systems capable of reliably, proactively, and cost-effectively supporting these demanding new workloads. As a result, all-flash storage arrays have become the foundation for many as businesses modernize their IT infrastructure.

“Any enterprise that intends to thrive in the 21^st century is a data-driven, multi-cloud organization,” said Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president of global industry research firm IDC. “The on-premises or private cloud component is crucial, but it’s not easy to get right. Now, multi-cloud is how storage natively operates.”

NVMe-accelerated, all-flash storage is an important new technology and a key component of modern multi-cloud environments for two reasons. First, it can deliver a significant boost in application performance and efficiency. Second, it enables businesses to easily and transparently expand their existing storage into the cloud with a flexible architecture designed to keep pace with their evolving needs.

For businesses, all-flash storage systems – particularly those built with NVMe technology – can help them quickly gain the most value from their oceans of data, as they drive competitive advantage. For the storage industry, this represents a major shift away from traditional, on-premise only storage infrastructure to NVMe-based systems that quickly and reliably support business applications across private, hybrid, and public clouds.

Leveraging IBM’s industry acclaimed all-flash portfolio, IBM continues to revolutionize enterprise storage with the newly launched IBM FlashSystem 9100 – an NVMe-accelerated, multi-cloud enabled storage solution that utilizes AI technology from IBM Storage Insights software to help businesses reduce risk and optimize applications and workloads to deliver value to their organizations.

“The value and insights we gain from our data provide important advantages to our business. This means that high-performance storage has always been a crucial part of our IT infrastructure,” said Tim Conley, founder and principal of Advanced Technology Services (ATS) Group. “We have intended to move toward NVMe-based storage, but needed to keep deployment risks low. The new IBM FlashSystem 9100 enables us to take advantage of NVMe technology and performance with less risk, thanks to the maturity and stability of the IBM FlashSystem platform.”

For even more details on how IBM is redefining enterprise storage for the multi-cloud era, visit this IBM FlashSystem 9100 blog post.

This originally appeared on IBM Think Blog.