IBM DS8900F

High-performance storage solutions for mission-critical environments

More than 90% of enterprises around the world now operate in hybrid cloud environments, and this is expected to grow to 95% in the following 18 months from now. At the same time, many of the world’s leading industries rely on mainframes as the backbone of their IT and data processing infrastructure. Mainframes are a major driver of worldwide commerce, including banking, airlines, credit card processing, and retail operations.

The IBM DS8900F family of data systems offer an ideal solution for accelerating the dynamic hybrid cloud environments that characterize 21 business. IBM DS8900F brings proven, market-leading capabilities, with the performance, security, data resilience, and cost-efficiency needed to handle mission-critical and mainframe-driven business application workloads.

Mission-critical capabilities

IBM DS8900F data systems are designed to accelerate IBM Z, LinuxONE and IBM Power Systems as well as data-intensive workloads in open environments. Built with the most advanced processor technology, IBM DS8900F delivers next level performance, data resilience and enterprise availability to build faster, more efficient operations and make smarter decisions to transform data into business opportunities.

The DS8900F family includes four flexible models designed to address a wide variety of workloads and different business needs:

• IBM DS8910F model 993 is designed for medium-sized organizations looking for powerful enterprise capabilities delivered in a flexible, rack-mountable solution at the lowest entry cost. This solution can be integrated into IBM z15 model T02, IBM LinuxONE III model LT2, or customer provided 19-inch industry standard racks.
• IBM DS8910F model 994 is designed for midrange organizations looking to meet storage challenges with advanced functionality offered in a prepackaged 40U 19-inch industry standard rack.
• IBM DS8950F model 996 provides better performance and higher capacity, enabling the consolidation of mission-critical workloads for IBM Z, IBM LinuxONE, IBM Power Systems, and open environments under a single enterprise storage solution.
• IBM DS8980F model 998 delivers the best performance to help customers process transactions faster, while allowing them to expand their workload possibilities to AI and Business intelligence.

All four IBM DS8900F offerings provide the following benefits:

• The fastest application response time for mainframe environments, with latencies as low as 18μs.
• Better than 99.99999 (“seven nines”) availability and no-data-loss automatic failover within metropolitan distances.
• The fastest disaster recovery solution for mainframe, with 2 seconds RPO and less than 60 seconds RTO at more than 1,000 miles.
• Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT) to enable hybrid cloud storage solutions as additional tiers for disaster recovery, data archiving and long-term retention in IBM Z environments.
• Encryption of data at-rest, in-flight and when it is transmitted to the cloud without any impact on performance.
• IBM Safeguarded Copy functionality to protected data from malware, ransomware, and many other adverse cyber events.
• Persistent storage for mission-critical containers with support for IBM Cloud Pak™ solutions to enhance and extend the functionality of Red Hat® OpenShift.

On-going innovation

The IBM DS8900F family is the perfect storage foundation for consolidating transactional, cloud native, and AI workloads under a single all flash mission-critical solution, delivering the following benefits to customers as compared to the previous generation:

• Up to 25% reduction in response time for mainframe and 16% reduction in response time for Open Systems to process transactions faster, while expanding workloads to AI, Analytics and Business Intelligence.
• 15x more system cache to improve the potential for cache hit rate and delivering faster background operations.
• 10x availability improvement to maximize systems uptime with an average of only 3 seconds downtime in a year. From six (99.9999) to seven nines (99.99999) of availability.
• 2x greater bandwidth capacity for the establish Metro Mirror pair function with 32 GFC host adapters.
• 19% less weight and 5% less energy consumption improving environmental while obtaining savings in maintenance and operating costs.

Data security is another area of enhancement within the IBM DS8900F family. Now, SP 800-131A compliant encryption can be extended to data in flight between IBM DS8900F arrays and all individual VTL systems in a TS7770 grid. And because there’s no need to configure key groups, key managers, or other configurable items, encryption is now even easier within DS8900F / TS7770 environments. In addition, the IBM DS8900F family now has the option of a local key manager to enable and manage encryption at rest, protecting data and reducing complexity while keeping expenses and operation costs low.

Ultra-low application response times

In addition to an architecture optimized for high-performance flash storage media, IBM DS8900F solutions also offer extremely fast data access enabled by technologies such as IBM zHyperLink – the result of an IBM research project created to provide ultra-low latency links between mainframe servers and storage systems. IBM zHyperLink dramatically accelerates

 access to data with less than 18μs response time and can be integrated with IBM HyperSwap to meet the needs of high performance in high availability environments.

IBM DS8900F provides consistent performance for read operations in high availability environments for metropolitan regions, reducing the negative impact of increased latency caused by the separation distance between storage systems. This capability enables reads from a secondary site both over FICON and zHyperLink to obtain the same response time as the primary system and better workload balance.

Powerful cyber resilience

The IBM DS8000 family is the leader in the external storage market for mainframe environments; these proven data systems have been deployed in business-critical environments for more than two decades, this is the reason why 18 of the top 20 banks worldwide use IBM DS8000 storage solutions.

IBM DS8900F is designed to manage the full spectrum of storage workloads that exist in today’s dynamic business environments and do it while offering very high performance and system availability, with industry-leading data protection and disaster recovery features. An important security feature offered by DS8900F is its comprehensive support for the IBM Z suite of data protection technologies collectively labeled pervasive encryption. These technologies enable extensive encryption of data in-flight and at-rest to substantially simplify encryption and reduce costs associated with protecting data.

The unrelenting tide of data breaches is driving increased interest in secure authentication across hybrid cloud environments. IBM provides a unique technology that ensures data is accessed only by authorized server and storage devices in order to reduce and eliminate insider threats of unauthorized access to the Storage Area Network. IBM Fibre Channel Endpoint Security is an end-to-end solution which ensures all data flowing on FICON and Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) links from IBM Z to IBM DS8900F systems is encrypted. This solution provides in-flight protection for all data, independent of the operating system or access method in use.

IBM DS8900F also offers the powerful data security functionality of IBM Safeguarded Copy. This technology provides immutable points of data recovery that are hidden and protected from being modified or deleted. These immutable copies are a trusted and secure source of data that can be used for forensic analyses or surgical or catastrophic recoveries. For increased security, Safeguarded Copy provides dual management control and can be integrated with different disaster recovery and high availability configurations.

In order to extend cyber resilience even further, IBM DS8900F can now back up full data volumes to the cloud where they can later be used to repair or recover production environments that have been compromised by user errors, malicious destruction, or ransomware attacks. This functionality leverages the benefits of TCT, including AES 256-bit encryption.