Storage Engineer
Early in 2021, IBM started revitalizing their Open Systems Storage platform with the release of the FlashSystem 5200 (aka FS5200.) Recently, IBM further leapfrogged their competition by refreshing their mid-range and high end enterprise FlashSystem arrays. The FS7300 and FS9500 respectively. Knowing our economic times and outside influences require continually reacting and adapting to challenges and changes in the business world you should ask yourself, is your enterprise tired of going to battle over support experiences from outages due to your relic architecture? Or are you suffering from punitive maintenance contracts? Perhaps, you have been tasked to overcome technical debt in your current open systems architecture?
Additionally, are you ready to deploy a modernized and simplified storage architecture? One which enables your enterprise not just to the next level but enables you for what comes next! If you answered, yes, to either of these, stay with me as we review the revamped IBM FlashSystem array line with even more powerful and robust features and functionality.
Cyber Resilience
Knowing that enterprise architectures are built around software not just hardware. Revel in the revamped FlashSystem hardware and enhanced Spectrum Virtualize software which brings and increased business agility and rapid ROI timeframes. How has your current storage platform allowed you to pivot and effectively combat Ransomware attacks? Hackers are relentless, knowing this, you should stay current with tools and techniques in combating their exploits to protect your enterprise from being front page news and exfiltrating your data in conjunction with allowing recovery of clean data. IBM is keeping hackers out of datasets via a feature called SafeGuarded Copy (AKA SGC). Which is a logical volume protection copy of your data, protected from rogue admins and hackers alike. SGC provides physical and/or virtual isolation, which type of air-gap solution is your InfoSec team requiring? The controlling software for SGC is IBM Copy Services Manager (aka CSM), through this separation your copied data is not even addressable via the application(s). While leveraging CSM you can rapidly restore your copies to another storage area and begin remediation to ensure your data copies are free of malware and ransomware. To size your SGC offering your enterprise needs to answer a couple of questions Q1 – How often do you capture your data copies? Q2 How long do you retain these copies I.E., duration. The questions are easy, while deriving the answers can be difficult. Take for example, the fact that normal dwell time for hackers in an enterprise is 189 days. Are you planning to have that many copies of your data?
Classical open systems storage infrastructures can’t properly address this newer attack vector, what are you doing to adapt? Protecting primary as well as secondary datasets is paramount for every enterprise. Perhaps your enterprise plan is to pay the ransom and recover from what data they unlock? Know that enterprises that pay ransom typically only recover 30-65% of their data. Would your enterprise survive only being able to access a subset of your data? Keeping the average cost of an attack from and center on an enterprise comes in at a costly $3.86M, which costs less the prevention or the cure? How do you measure damage to a brand based on ransomware exploits?
Your Cyber Security Resilience strategy needs to include and leveraging a clean room approach. Perhaps, a new concept for you, this allows you to review copied data sets without risk of reinfection and/or to determine when the hackers started their dwell timeframe via threat hunting techniques. Additionally, you need to have your ITOps and SecOps teams performing tabletop exercises against your plans and procedures to see what works well, what needs to be refined and what you are lacking in your recovery strategy. These exercises require lots of practice, prior to an actual event so your teams are skilled and ready to begin when the actual event occurs. Because, with Ransomware and Malware it is only a matter of When not IF. Recall, a Ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. How long do you think your security through obscurity will protect you and your datasets?
Recovery from a ransomware/malware event needs to be thought of in a different way than traditional Business Continuance (aka BC) and (Disaster Recovery (DR), the time frames are going to be longer, your SLAs are going to be different. You should develop out a modular incident response document to be prepared for several different types of attacks. Have you communicated to your business units it may take 2-4 days just to get your priority 1 applications back online using antiquated recovery tools? How about a month or more for your lower level applications? How ready is your business for these types of impact? You can and will overcome these hurdles with planning and execution of a modular recovery plan when used in conjunction with IBM SafeGuarded Copy.
Performance, Management, and Price
You might be wondering with all these native capabilities can it perform? How does less than 50us latency and 45Gbps bandwidth sound for the FS7300 all in 2U of rack space. Packing about 25% more performance than its predecessor the FS7200! Some of that performance enhancement comes from the newer Intel chipsets and some from increased cache densities. However, most of the performance increases stem from enhancing their ultra-performant FlashCore Modules now version 3 (aka FCM3) which are NVMe over Fabric (aka NVMeoF) enabled. All while delivering an industry leading 3:1 data reduction rate without performance impacts. Nothing to turn on and tune the data reduction just performs against your datasets. You might be wondering how easy is it to manage all these great features? IBM has the easy button of FlashSystem storage with their graphical user interface (aka GUIs) for simplified management and one skillset across all FlashSystem.
Still not convinced, how about less than 45us latency and 95Gbps bandwidth for the FS9500 sound? Both the FS7300 & FS9500 can scale-out in 2-4-way clustering, allowing near linear scaling in minimal rack footprints. Perhaps your enterprise craves ultra-performance, you can run Storage Class Memory (AKA SCM) drives in both arrays without overrunning the array’s.
All this performance and security while ensuring your rock-star enterprise performers such as SAP HANA, Oracle RAC, Cassandra or even PostgreSQL perform blazing fast and without interruptions. Additionally, VMware, ERP/CRM and your ITSM Workflows are fully supported too. Lest we forget nor overlook your real-time analytics AI/ML offerings, these arrays are excellent performers for all these workloads.
Now your head is swimming, thinking you cannot afford these arrays; great features must come with a high price tag? Know they are very cost effective coming in at prices to beat the competition daily.
Summary
The entire IBM FlashSystem family is built to tackle your most challenging workloads and prices while not breaking the bank. Security and Backup Alignment are Critical to Ransomware Recovery along with separation of duties of ITOps and InfoSec. Surely, deploying an ounce of prevention is better that a pound of cure. Regardless of your workloads being legacy based or modern AI workloads. Prepare for your data center modernization by adopting IBM FlashSystem while unlocking most Hybrid cloud choices without all the other vendors lock-in!
More Information
Mainline is a Platinum level IBM Business Partner, the highest level in the IBM PartnerWorld program, with 30+ years of experience in enterprise IT solutions and proven expertise to help you solve your business challenges. For more information on building a cyber resilient hybrid cloud environment or to gain more efficiencies from your data storage environment, contact your Mainline Account Executive directly or reach out to us here with any questions.
You may be interested in
BLOG: IBM FlashSystem 5200 Entry-Level Storage Unveiling
BLOG: IBM FlashSystem Safeguarded Copy – Enhanced Data Protection
BLOG: IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI – Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure for the Enterprise