Flash Storage Recommendation

A personalized report from IBM Flash Storage Advisor

Your Workload

Mixed Workloads
More than ever before, enterprises rely on a spectrum of applications Your Priorities
to accomplish both customer facing and internal operational tasks.
Beyond the considerations imposed by the workload itself are those
Retail and transactional applications generate revenue. Mobile apps
that address the unique priorities of your specific use case.
enable customer interactions on any connected device. ERP, CRM,
and HR applications drive corporate and staff management. Real-time According to the information you provided:
analytics respond to shifting customer preferences and market trends.
√√ Your workload requires block data storage.
Big data and batch processing applications provide insight for better
business decisions. Each of these types of applications has a distinct √√ You don’t want the solution to virtualize your
profile of I/O and throughput patterns, capacity and latency needs, existing environment.
and security and compliance requirements. Each creates unique
challenges for underlying IT infrastructure. Combined, they generate a
wide range of mixed IT workloads that is only expanding over time.

To change your workload, click here to retake the assessment.

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Mixed Workloads

Workload Profile
Latency
Key Considerations
Certain attributes of the workload profile can dominate considerations when evaluating
products for purchase. Key considerations for mixed workloads include: Randomness Capacity
Randomness – Randomness is a measure of the likelihood that application data will be
read and written with no significance to its location on persistent storage. While random-
ness can have a significant impact on the performance of disk-based arrays, it does not
negatively impact the performance of all-flash arrays.

IOPS – IOPS is a measure of an application’s storage input / output performance,

Read sensitivity IOPS
expressed as input / output operations per second.

Latency – Latency is a measure of immediacy and responsiveness required from a

storage system when serving application I / O or job requests.
Temporal/Burst Bandwidth
Bandwidth – Bandwidth is a measure of an application’s storage input / output
throughput, expressed in MB / second or GB / second.

Temporal / Burst – Temporal / Burst is a measure of an application’s storage I / O variance

from the average I / O performance over a given period of time.
How To Read This Chart
Less Critical Considerations Radar charts allow you to observe multiple parameters on a single graph.

Other attributes of the workload profile are less critical for mixed workloads. They include:
Capacity – Capacity is a measure of the persistent storage amount required to store
application data.
Attributes with points near the center of the graph indicate a relative low importance
for the given workload.
Conversely, points nearer the edges of the graph indicate the attribute has high
relevance for the given workload.

Read sensitivity – Read sensitivity is a measure of the relative amount of time that the Each workload has its own profile based upon these attributes.
application’s storage I / O profile is predominantly comprised of read operations. Key considerations are the most significant and are typically the primary
considerations in selecting a solution.

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 WORKLOAD CATEGORY:

Mixed Workloads
analytics workloads. The new user interface simplifies cloud resource provisioning,
while industry-leading software defined storage capabilities provide the full range of
management and data protection features.

IBM FlashSystem A9000
Your Personalized Recommendation
IBM FlashSystem A9000R employs from two to six grid elements within a single rack,
each composed of two grid controllers and one flash storage enclosure. The system comes
as a pre-configured, fully-integrated, rack-based platform with InfiniBand switches to
IBM FlashSystem A900R
enable ultra-low latency scale-out plus a “white glove” support model to revolutionize the
solution design and deployment experience. With its grid storage architecture that enables
multiple-copy, multi-site data protection while providing easy scale-out capabilities,
IBM FlashSystem A9000R is an excellent platform for rapidly growing cloud storage and
desktop virtualization environments.

IBM FlashSystem A9000 or IBM FlashSystem A9000R
IBM FlashSystem A9000
IBM FlashSystem A9000 integrates the extreme performance of IBM FlashCore technology,
highly parallel architecture, and comprehensive data reduction in one powerful solution.
The systems are purpose-engineered to extend IBM FlashSystem leadership to hybrid
cloud workloads and big data analytics at any scale.
Powered by IBM Spectrum Accelerate software, IBM FlashSystem A9000 offers always-on,
fully in-line data reduction that includes pattern removal, data deduplication, and compres-
sion that can provide storage capacity savings of 80% or more, depending on the workload.
The system introduces a new GUI with IBM Hyper-Scale Manager designed with quality of
service features that enable agile scale-out and orchestration of multi-tenant cloud storage
solutions. Additional IBM FlashSystem A9000 systems can be added and managed from
a single IBM Hyper-Scale interface. And thanks to its mature IBM Spectrum Accelerate
foundation, the system also integrates well with VMware and other leading application
virtualization technologies.
IBM FlashSystem A9000R
IBM FlashSystem A9000R offers all the advantages of IBM FlashSystem A9000 in a rack
configuration. The self-tuning, flash-optimized grid storage architecture delivers consistent
high performance and rich management capabilities for cloud, virtualized, and big data
Why We Recommend These Products
In the 21st century, IT infrastructure must support a rapidly expanding list of mixed tradi-
tional and modern application workloads, from rational databases and online transaction
processing to mobile apps and real-time analytics. A powerful new IT trend involves the
integration of on-premises and cloud resources. This is hybrid cloud, and it brings added
challenges and potential complications to organizations requiring basic block storage
to support their wide spectrum of mixed workloads. But hybrid cloud also offers many
benefits. To take the fullest advantage of hybrid cloud, while simultaneously providing the
storage performance, efficiency, and data services that other mixed workloads demand,
you need IBM FlashSystem A9000 or IBM FlashSystem A9000R.
Based On Your Priorities
IBM FlashSystem A9000 and IBM FlashSystem A9000R make ideal choices for enterprises
that want the option to leverage hybrid cloud solutions for any or all of their mixed appli-
cation workloads. These systems provide a full suite of storage services, plus multi-ten-
ancy, QoS, and other cloud functionality to facilitate hybrid cloud architectures. To these
features they add exceptional data protection and scalability thanks to their IBM Spectrum
Accelerate-based grid architectures, and a comprehensive data reduction suite that
includes pattern removal, deduplication, and compression to drive down storage costs and
footprint. And thanks to their IBM FlashCore technology foundations, they provide the
all-flash performance you need to get the most productivity possible from each one of your
many mixed application workloads.

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Mixed Workloads
Additional Considerations IBM FlashSystem A9000

Hybrid cloud at any scale https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/small-cloud-storage

With IBM FlashSystem, you can facilitate and support hybrid cloud architectures at any
scale. IBM FlashSystem A9000 is an 8U “pod” designed for public and private cloud service IBM FlashSystem A9000R
providers that need to start smaller and easily scale out as needed. For larger
https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/large-cloud-storage
enterprises and true cloud-scale business use cases, rack-based IBM FlashSystem A9000R
can easily scale up to multi-petabytes and scale out almost limitlessly, all while providing
VersaStack by IBM and Cisco
very consistent all-flash performance and a full spectrum of storage services, data
reduction, and multi-tenancy and QoS features. https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/versastack

Chat with an Expert

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Available as VersaStack Converged Infrastructure © Copyright IBM Corporation 2018

IBM Global Services

Both IBM FlashSystem A9000 and IBM FlashSystem A9000R are available as VersaStack
solutions. For enterprises moving to integrated infrastructure but still needing the efficiency
and performance of software-defined storage, VersaStack is a pretested and pre-validated
converged infrastructure solution from IBM and Cisco. It is designed for fast
deployment and rapid time to value as well as versatility, efficiency, and ease of
management. VersaStack is based on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Integrated
Infrastructure – some of the most highly regarded server and network components in
the industry – and offers multiple IBM storage configurations based on IBM FlashSystem
and Storwize systems leveraging IBM Spectrum Virtualize and IBM Spectrum Accelerate
technologies. VersaStack offers targeted solutions for hybrid cloud, Infrastructure as a
Service, cloud object storage, remote and branch offices, and virtual desktops, as well as
the full range of big data analytics and mixed application workload environments.
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