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IBM FlashSystem 9500 Has Landed in the ATC

IBM's flagship FlashSystem storage array is now up and running in WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC). Learn more about the capabilities of their newest storage array.

In this blog

WWT's ATC has grown their IBM storage footprint by acquiring IBM's flagship storage offering for distributed environments. Customers are now able to reserve the FlashSystem 9500 for POCs and evaluation. This adds to our existing IBM FlashSystem portfolio of the FlashSystem 5200 and 5100 arrays.

The latest IBM FlashSystem array is built around IBM's Virtualize storage software, and focuses on maximum performance and flexibility. In a minimalist size of four rack units, the 9500 has 48 drive slots and 12 IO card slots that allow for maximum configuration flexibility and density. And while 90 percent of customers use FlashCore modules for storage, the array also supports standard NVMe flash, SAS and SCM drives.

One of the most impressive capabilities that the 9500 shares with other arrays in the FlashSystem family is the ability to virtualize third-party storage as a tier behind the storage controllers. This allows customers to add current features to their older arrays, as well as a rock-solid data migration platform. The virtualize software integrated into FlashSystem arrays can add tiering, encryption, cyber resiliency, data reduction, and replication / high availability to non-IBM storage arrays.

The IBM FlashSystem has integrated support for mirroring data to and from cloud data centers for disaster recovery, cyber resiliency or DevOps scenarios. This capability seamlessly integrates with Amazon's AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud.

Our FlashSystem 9500 includes:

  • 4 x 24-core Intel Ice Lake CPUs
  • 3TB of primary system cache
  • 16 x 32GB Fibre Channel ports
  • 8 x Infiniband / 200Gb Ethernet ports
  • Real-time compression at the hardware level
  • Security
    • Hardware-based encryption (256-bit AES)
    • Immutable Data Copies
    • Multifactor Authentication
    • Secured IP Partnerships
    • Support for internal Root Certificate Authority

 ATC labs and POCs

The primary value of WWT's ATC is to allow customers to see and test new solutions prior to making a large investment. We have made a significant investment in IBM Storage technology, allowing customers hands-on experience with management and administration as well as performance and resiliency capabilities. Perhaps the most valuable use case is demonstrating multi-vendor interoperability, which is something most manufacturers cannot do.

With the addition of the FlashSystem 9500, our ATC can now demonstrate the more advanced capabilities of the IBM storage portfolio – such as 3-way replication, storage virtualization, cyber-resilient data copies with IBM Guardium Security integration, cloud tiering, and industry-leading performance metrics, just to name a few. For customers seeking a high performance storage environment with zero downtime, we are also able to demonstrate IBM's Hyperswap technology, which allows customers to cluster multiple arrays together for a 100 percent uptime guarantee.

 Learn more

WWT's engineering teams are excited to showcase and help educate customers on the new possibilities being brought to storage technology with IBM's FlashSystem 9500.

Technologies