In this series on Flash Storage, we've talked about cost, we've talked about speed, now it's time to discuss some topics near and dear to any IT department's heart. Specifically, I'd like to explain what IBM Flash Systems can do for a business’s Cyber Protection and Cyber Resilience. Both of which are capabilities unique in the flash industry to IBM.

Firstly, the IBM FCM-4 (as described in my previous note) not only delivers hardware compression and encryption with no performance penalty, it provides real time threat detection and reporting. This function can spot suspicious activity (such as files being encrypted) and further report that to your monitoring tools, regardless of who the SIEM and SOAR provider is. Customers sometimes get a response from IBM notifying them of a cyber issue before their internal teams are even aware of it themselves. Imagine getting ahead of data corruption, so you may only have to recover dozens of files instead of hundreds or thousands. Does that have value? Did I mention that this is included at no added cost as part of an IBM Flash System purchase? No one else does this real time protection. No one. This is worth your time to better understand.

Okay, let’s assume you somehow end up with data corruption. Now what do you do? Whether you need to recover dozens or thousands of files, wouldn’t it be nice if there were immutable copies of all those files, not on tape or behind some backup software, but right on the same array? With IBM Safe Guarded Copy (SGC), you have just that. On-array immutable copies are available for recovery in seconds to minutes, not days or weeks. This topic alone is also worth another hour of your time to better understand. As with the security issue described in the paragraph above, this is something the competition cannot do. (Note, in the spirit of full disclosure, there is one software product required to manage the Safe Guarded Copies. It is chargeable and is based on capacity being protected.)

Many vendors tell you what they can do. Fewer tell you what they can’t do. If they did, their customers would be flocking to IBM Flash Systems. I'll share my two cents: IBM has built a better mouse trap, a far better mouse trap. But they don’t have a large, dedicated storage sales force touting it, and so the message gets crowded out by busy schedules and other vendors promoting what they can do.

Because of this, it remains in your best interest to do your own homework. The customer has the hardest job of anyone: sorting through the mountains of sales BS to find the best solutions for their business. I hope this series of blog articles is helping you ask some good questions of your own organization and their buying habits. IBM and LRS are here to help you stretch your IT spend as much as possible. All you have to do is contact us.