IBM announces an all-flash refresh of the DS8880 storage array series-- one denoted by the addition of an F suffix aimed at mid- and high-end customers with strict uptime requirements.
The expanded series includes 3 arrays, the DS8884F, DS8886F and DS8888F. All are based on the IBM Power Systems server and use PCIe 3.0 connectivity, even if they lack the latest NVMe protocol. The company claims also the arrays offer "six nines availability," or continuous operation 99.9999% of the time.
The business-class DS8884F scales from 6.4 to 154 TB of flash capacity, and comes with 256GB DRAM cache and 32 fibre channel and FICON ports. The enterprise-class DS8886F scales from 6.4 to 614 TB of flash capacity, and is configured with 128TB DRAM cache and 128 fibre channel and FICON ports. The analytics-class DS8888F scales from 6.4 TB to 1.22 petabytes of flash storage capacity, and has 2TB cache and 128 fibre channel and FICON ports.
“The DS8880 all-flash family is targeted at users that have experienced poor storage performance due to latency, low server utilisation, 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,” Big Blue says. “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.”
The arrays ship end January 2017.