A major manufacturer decided to buy IBM Storage and some servers from Aerocom.  At the same time, they were becoming frustrated with their Manager Services Provider.  They were frustrated that they got a bill for everything, and services they thought would be part of the support deal were costing thousands.

They decided to go to the market and chose a company with an excellent proposal and excellent website, but as it turned out, with very poor service, and they had signed a contract. To say that the experience was disappointing would be an understatement.

With more experience using Managed Services Providers, they tested the market again and selected Aerocom, a Company with an ordinary website, but good service.  Not only did the frequent, unexpected bills stop, but the problems began to disappear. Their key applications began to work better and more reliably because their SQL environment was fixed, and their security improved out of sight.

IBM storage with Flash Core Modules.

When the time came for their IT infrastructure to be replaced, they heard that IBM had developed new flash storage technology.  IBM was finding that their customers were becoming annoyed with the quality of SSDs – and they bought a company called Texas Memory and set them the task of developing better flash storage – based on the new NVMe standard.  The results were beyond expectation.

With a Storage Array using IBM Flash Core Modules, drive failures dropped to Nil, and performance jumped dramatically.  The IBM storage enabled them to do a database report that used to take 6 hours, in 15 minutes. Everyone noticed the difference, and the management decision to update from a good SAN to a great one was more than vindicated.

The company had seen the devastation a ransomware had caused to one of their competitors, so the next decision was to implement IBM Safe Guarded Copy that makes regular immutable snapshots of critical data so that if a cyber-criminal does get past their strong defenses, they will not lose their data.

Backing up M365. We are planning on moving the office environment to Azure and using M365. With safe Guarded Copy we can back up their Azure environment to their IBM storage and take a Safe Guarded Copy of that data, so that if the cloud environment is damaged or compromised – all the data will be safe up to the last backup.

The recent developments in IBM storage

THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING PIECE OF IT EQUIPMENT!

IBM FlashSystem (FS)5200 with 14TB up to 345 TB of net FLASH Storage before Compression and Dedupe, in the controller.

  • Ransomware protection for your data.  IBM Safeguarded Copy enables data volumes to have immutable snapshots for recovery from Ransomware or data loss – BUILT into the SAN! At no extra cost! And more work on security protections is coming.
  • Much LONGER LASTING FLASH storage modules. These are designed for 7 years instead of 3-4 which is often the life of other flash storage modules and disks. With about 100,000 IBM Storage Arrays sold per year, and often, dozens of FCMs per unit – since 2019 – 0.0% have worn out. 
  • Input/Outputs/Sec of typically 200,000 instead of 3000 to 8000 typical in many competitors’ units. We achieve this using NVMe and processors on each Flash Module.
  • Built in HW compression and encryption. Also done by the processors in the Flash Modules themselves. Also Dedupe in the System.
  • Priced very competitively against competitors with far inferior options.
  •  A smaller version of systems IBM provides to the big 5 Aus. commercial banks, Universities, and top ASX 200 Companies.
  • The Technology built to underpin AI.
  • Easy GUI driven console and heaps of how-to videos.

This link will take you to a page where you can look at models and do price comparisons for standard ‘Street” prices on models  https://ibm.biz/BdfG7s prior to our special discounts.

Not 2 processors but 16

An IBM FS5200 with two controllers, have 8 core procs standard as well as Intel ASICs for managing deduplication, and with 12 IBM FlashCore Modules, has effectively 16 processors. Compression is done, without any performance penalty, within the modules themselves and the internal reliability, performance, and space saving functions are managed by the processors, in the modules.

Benefits to Customers:

  • Flash lifespan is extended. The FlashCore modules were designed and built in Nth America with life expectancy of 7 years.
  • Much longer life for the Storage Array
  • Latency does not degrade.
  • Errors and downtime reduced or completely eliminated.
  • Compression without penalty
  • You become focused on real world workloads rather than
    warranty issues.
  • The system complies with NVMe Standard and can use any NVMe storage products including SCM and future products.
  • Not only will the FS5200 perform with very low latency when new – with the IBM FCMs, it will continue to do so for many years and even as capacity is filled up.