New Flash from IBM Targets Unstructured Data Analytics

JBOF (“jay-boff”), or Just A Bunch of Flash, may sound like a pejorative acronym. But when industry analyst Randy Kerns, senior strategist at Evaluator Group, used it in reference to new flash storage technology announced today by IBM, he meant it in a favorable way.

The IBM DeepFlash 150 is a flash solution targeting large analytics workloads involving high volumes of unstructured data, and it’s offered at under $1 per gigabyte of data (and less after compression or deduplification). According to Kerns, the combination of lower cost and the ability to address a growing market need make it a potentially important step on the path to broader adoption of flash as the mainstream storage technology of choice.

“The fact is that flash is going to be the dominant storage technology going forward,” Kerns told EnterpriseTech, “rapidly replacing spinning disk technology. Up until this point we’ve been mostly looking at, with our customers, putting plans in place to transition all the primary storage requirements to flash. What you have with the DeepFlash 150 is the recognition that there’s value to deploying flash for more than primary storage. Now (organizations) can look at special-use requirements with the value in the reliability, power and the density that you get from flash. So it’s a broadening in the applicability and usage of flash technology.”

To read the rest of the article, please go to www.enterprisetech.com/2016/07/26/new-flash-ibm-targets-unstructured-data-analytics-workloads/