IBM will announce an expansion of its Elastic Storage platform at a company conference this week, according to a report.
Computerworld U.S. said that on Monday the company will reveal an integrated Elastic Storage system built around the IBM Power platform, as well as support for Elastic Storage for Linux-based System Z mainframes at the IBM Enterprise14 conference in Las Vegas. They’ll go on sale Dec. 5.
Elastic Storage software creates virtual pools of capacity. It removes data related bottlenecks by providing parallel access to data, eliminating single filer choke points or hot spots, IBM’s Web site says. It also simplifies data management at scale by providing a single namespace that can be scaled simply, quickly, and infinitely by simply adding more scale-out resources.
Elastic Storage has been sold as IBM’s GPFS Storage Server, an x86-based integrated system. That will now be sold by Lenovo following its acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business
The new products are
–IBM Elastic Storage Server, a combination of IBM Power Systems server hardware, storage enclosures and disks plus Elastic Storage software. It will come in a range of configurations to meet the needs of different size enterprises and will be scalable to hundreds of petabytes of capacity, according to the report.
–A version of Elastic Storage for Linux on System Z mainframes.
“IBM is aiming Elastic Storage at enterprises that want to collect all the unstructured data they can from a range of sources and analyze it to learn about trends and make better decisions,” according to the report. “It supports OpenStack for use across private and public clouds, as well as big-data technologies including Hadoop.
“Elastic Storage is based on technology that IBM’s Watson system used to access facts it needed to compete on the TV game show “Jeopardy” in 2011. It also has its roots in GPFS (General Parallel File System) but got a new name with major enhancements that came this year.