In my last Blog, I mentioned that had IBM refreshed its mainframe storage in 4Q of 2024 and that the news was drowned out by all the holiday chaos. As promised, this blog will focus on the DS8000 announcement: the Gen 10.
The new DS8000, called the Gen10, is the latest in a string of DS8000 products that have vaulted IBM back into dominance in the mainframe storage space. Some time ago, IBM coined the term “Sea Scape Architecture” (though I’m not sure if they trademarked it). The idea was to use and re-use common building blocks of IBM technology to make better storage via the use of the unique server technologies IBM has in-house. The first DS8000’s, built with early IBM POWER processors some time ago, were not really fast by today’s standards. They were, however, the base that allows IBM to keep coming up and with faster and faster products, each time reusing 90%+ of the previous code base for the new offerings.
The latest result, the Gen 10, is a DS8000 based on POWER 9+ technology with blazing speed, Terabytes of cache, and Petabytes of all flash capacity. But as cool as that is, it isn’t really anything new. The previous DS8000 generation did the same, albeit a bit slower. The DS8000 outruns its Hitachi and EMC counterparts in terms of speed and throughput and keeps widening that lead. Add to that a list of features like z/HyperLink for Db2 performance acceleration, and IBM remote replication technology that is the Industry Gold Standard, and the gap just gets wider and wider.
On top of all that, something truly new is offered on the Gen 10: the use of IBM’s Flash Core Module, Generation-4 technology (FCM-4). FCM-4 has been tested and proven in IBM’s FlashSystem family of open systems flash storage products. The FMC-4 brings a couple of things new to the mainframe storage space, namely flash card based HW compression and online threat detection. IBM compression is not poor man’s compression (i.e., write the data then rewrite it to compress). It is on-the-fly, at wire speed, compression. All in one pass.
Online threat detection means that the FCM’s are proactively monitoring their data and looking for signs of malware. With the help of an inference engine, and access to IBM’s Security data bases, it provides improved time to threat detection and response. To be fair, each of these functions (compression and threat detection) will need some host server code to be fully exploited. But the point is that both are now available under the covers, as standard features, and will be built upon with new code levels.
The message, in a nutshell, is this: the product that was already mopping up the floor with the other guy’s products is now not only faster and larger (again) but has expanded the list of features that further differentiate it from the other guys. And these features aren’t just fluffy stuff. They are meat and potatoes functions that every customer gets hard dollar benefits from, including:
- Eight 9’s availability
- Db2 response times of 18 microseconds
- One pass, on-the-fly, wire speed compression
- Data at rest and on-the-fly encryption
- Remote replication RTO’s and RPO’s that set the industry Gold Standard
- Online flash-card based threat detection and reporting
- Array-based Safe Guarded Copy (Immutable Copy) protection for faster recovery
If you haven’t looked at IBM DS8000 storage in the last 2-3 years, you will be shocked at how much has changed. All the good stuff you remember is still there. But it’s been enhanced with a raft of new functionality that helps keep your mainframe on the forefront of capability within your organization. To learn more, please see the links on LRS’s website, or drop us a line.