IBM expands storage portfolio to support AI

IBM expands storage portfolio to support AI

IBM is expanding its storage portfolio to help enterprises build an optimized AI infrastructure. The new products should make it easier for enterprises to implement AI in their infrastructure.

The new Elastic Storage System 5000 (ESS 5000) is a software-defined storage solution designed for the first phase of an organisation’s “AI journey” which is data collection. It is optimised for high-capacity data lakes and links Spectrum Scale, IBM’s high-performance clustered file system software, to IBM Power9 compute.

ESS 5000 delivers 55GB/sec performance throughput per node and is scalable to yottabyte configurations. It can be seamlessly integrated with a high-performance storage layer, such as the ESS 3000, which IBM unveiled last year to meet data analysis requirements.

Cloud Object Storage

In addition, IBM announced that the Cloud Object Storage (COS) would be updated with a new software engine to deliver better performance. With the new update, reads should improve by 300 percent and writes by 150 percent, depending on the size of the object. The improved performance could enable COS to support integration with AI and big data workflows. The system will also support high-capacity disc drives, called Shingled Magnetic Recording, increasing the capacity to 1.9 PB in a 4u disc enclosure.

Finally, IBM Spectrum Discover, a software for cataloguing and indexing file and object data, is deployed on Red Hat OpenShift. This makes it easier for companies to deploy their data in the cloud.

Digital Transformation

At the IBM Think Digital 2020 conference in May, CEO Arvind Krishna said that AI is crucial for digital transformation. At the IBM Think Digital 2020 conference in May, CEO Arvind Krishna said AI would be essential for digital transformation. According to Krishna, every company will become an AI company. “Not because they can, but because they have to.”