IBM (NYSE: IBM) this week announced new, all-flash storage solutions designed for midrange and large enterprises, where high availability, continuous up-time, and performance are critical. These are built to provide the speed and reliability needed for workloads ranging from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial transactions to cognitive applications like machine learning and natural language processing. The solutions announced today are designed to support cognitive workloads which clients can use to uncover trends and patterns that help improve decision-making, customer service and ROI.

IBM continues to push the boundaries in the design of flash solutions developed with the performance to manage the most demanding workloads such as “six nines availability,” ensuring continuous operations 99.9999 percent of the time. Through deep integration between IBM Storage and IBM z Systems, co-developed software that provides data protection, remote replication and optimization for midrange and large enterprises, is embedded in these new solutions. This advanced microcode is ideal for cognitive workloads on z Systems and Power System requiring the highest availability and system reliability possible.

“The DS8880 All-Flash family is targeted at users that have experienced poor storage performance due to latency, low server utilization, high energy consumption, low system availability and high operating costs. These same users have been listening, learning and understand the data value proposition of being a cognitive business,” said Ed Walsh, general manager, IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure. “In the coming year we expect an awakening by companies to the opportunity that cognitive applications, and hybrid cloud enablement, bring them in a data driven marketplace.”

Today’s IBM is announcing a new family of DS8880 all-flash systems designed to meet a wide variety of business applications, workloads, and use cases where microsecond response times and uncompromised availability are sought. The family includes:

· Business Class Storage – the IBM DS8884F has been designed for traditional applications such as ERP, order processing, database transactions, customer relationship management and human resources information systems. It offers the lowest entry cost for midrange enterprises with 256 GB Cache (DRAM) and between 6.4-154 TB of Flash Capacity.

· Enterprise Class Storage – the IBM DS8886F has been engineered for high speed transactional operations like high-performance online transaction processing, high-speed commercial data processing, high-performance data warehouse and data mining and critical financial transaction systems. It provides users 2 TB Cache (DRAM) and between 6.4-614.4 TB of Flash Capacity.

· Analytic Class Storage – the IBM DS8888F is ideal for cognitive and real-time analytics and decision making including predictive analytics, real time optimization, machine learning and cognitive systems, natural language speech and video processing. To support this it delivers 2 TB Cache (DRAM) and between 6.4 TB-1.22 PB of Flash Capacity providing superior performance and capacity able to address the most demanding business workload requirements.

Working through a network of offices, supported by a team of over 850, the Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia (Zavod za zdravstveno zavarovanje Slovenije), provides health insurance to approximately two million customers. In order to successfully manage its new customer-facing applications (e.g. electronic ordering processing and electronic receipts) its storage system required additional capacity and performance. After completing research of solutions capable of managing these applications – which included both Hitachi and EMC – the organization deployed the IBM DS8886 along with IBM DB2 for z System/OS data server software to provide an integrated data backup and restore system.

“As long-time users of IBM storage infrastructure and mainframes, our upgrade to the IBM DS8000 with IBM business partner Comparex was an easy choice. Since then, its high performance and reliability have led us to continually deploy newer DS8000 models as new features and functions have provided us new opportunities,” said Bojan Fele, CIO of Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia. “Our DS8000 implementation has improved our reporting capabilities by reducing time to actionable insights. Furthermore, it has increased employee productivity, ensuring we can better serve our clients.”

According to Scott Sinclair, a senior analyst at ESG, the announcement by IBM on its family of new all-flash DS8880 solutions is very impressive in regards to performance gains and the move to offer flash across the portfolio a great step. By moving data to another path IBM is at the next level of innovation in order to take advantage of next generation technologies. Further to this, the classification of the new family of DS8880 into business, enterprise, and analytic solutions makes a lot of sense.

The new family of DS8880 all-flash data systems will be available worldwide on January 20, 2017 from IBM and through IBM Business Partners.