IBM continues to get accolades at Flash Memory Summit

16 August, 2017
Eric Herzog
IBM

At the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) it was announced last week that an NVMe over Fabrics demonstration that included IBM’s Spectrum Scale was named the 2017 recipient for “Most Innovative Flash Memory Business Application.”  IBM is a winner in this particular Best of Show category for the second year in a row.

IBM is very pleased to be a part of this award-winning NVMe-based solution. The collaboration demonstrates our commitment to the NVMe protocol and our capabilities for bringing NVMe solutions to the marketplace.

The 2017 FMS Most Innovative Flash Memory Business Application award went to a group of technology companies: IBM, Newisys, Intel, Mellanox and Kazan Networks. These industry leaders demonstrated a flash storage solution based on the Newisys NVMe Fabric Storage System, leveraging the capabilities of IBM Spectrum Scale software. The solution can deliver 15 million IOPS at a latency of around seven microseconds.

Jay Kramer, Chairman of the Awards Program and President of Network Storage Advisors Inc., said:

Flash memory is being used today in new groundbreaking ways and storage networks are evolving to leverage the performance and scalability that can be achieved with NVMe over Fabric solutions. We are proud to select Newisys along with their partners Kazan Networks, IBM, Intel, and Mellanox Technologies for the Best of Show Innovation Award for its innovation in raising the bar to new levels of performance, scalability, and interoperability to address the demands of mission-critical business application workloads.”  

By design, the Non-volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol allows host systems to more fully exploit the levels of parallelism possible in modern flash storage. It reduces I/O overhead and brings various performance improvements in comparison to previous interfaces that were originally developed for use with far slower storage.

IBM is committed to developing and implementing NVMe technologies across our entire storage portfolio, as well as participating in organizations such as the Non-Volatile Memory Express workgroup. For example, IBM FlashSystem A9000 includes features intrinsic to NVMe functionality, like the user-space I/O paradigm that speeds data performance by allowing applications to talk “directly” to flash storage instead of navigating several operating system layers. And IBM Spectrum Scale, part of IBM’s market-leading storage software, offers NVMe capabilities through its local read-only cache (LROC) feature.

It was for this reason, among others, that IBM Spectrum Scale was chosen to be part of the NVMe over Fabrics demonstration. IBM Spectrum Scale is a proven, highly-scalable, high-performance data and file management solution capable of managing hundreds of petabytes of data and billions of files. It provides a full-featured set of file data management tools, including advanced storage virtualization, integrated high availability, automated storage tiering, hybrid cloud support and high performance, all-flash configurations. Spectrum Scale is designed to support a wide range of workloads – from big data analytics to AI to machine learning to cognitive applications and more — using a variety of access protocols such as NVMe.

Last year, we won the award with our submission titled IBM FlashSystem accelerates cognitive cybersecurity. The very innovative flash use case involved multiple cutting-edge technologies – cognitive computing in the form of IBM Watson, a hybrid cloud architecture, the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and IBM FlashSystem all-flash storage arrays. When describing the 2016 IBM submission, Jay Kramer noted:

The judges of the Flash Memory Summit Awards Committee are always looking for the next killer app for flash memory, and IBM Cognitive Cybersecurity and IBM FlashSystem all-flash arrays’ ability to neutralize cybersecurity threats has hit a home run.”

photo of baseball playerOur batting average at Flash Memory Summit has been very impressive. Best of all, these FMS Best of Show awards demonstrate leadership in a wide range of technologies – NVMe, cybersecurity, cognitive apps, hybrid cloud – and of course flash storage. But don’t take my word for it. Come see IBM Spectrum Scale and other award-winning IBM storage technologies at our booths at both VMworlds. For anyone looking to leverage award-winning solutions, IBM Storage is the best game in town.

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