Availability, performance and capacity your applications and data will need

Advertorial A secure data lifecycle management strategy is a key contributor to operational resilience. But establishing one can be difficult when budgets are tight and cyber risks on the rise.

The pressure to accommodate workloads that need to move applications and data quickly across multiple on- and off-premises environments only adds to that challenge, as does the automation demands often associated with greater use of artificial intelligence (AI).

How can storage admins and IT architects address those requirements while simultaneously maximizing the capacity available to them?

IBM recently launched Flash Grid architecture, designed for moving data workloads between different systems all while being managed from a single control pane. You can mix and match the underlying storage devices to include different hardware models and generations within a single Flash Grid, with support for tiering and fast and designed for easy hardware replacement.

Each Flash Grid is engineered for greater scalability than usually associated with a traditional scale-out system by supporting up to eight systems per Flash Grid and linear increases in performance, capacity and number of volumes, hosts and snapshots.

The architecture has been designed to address the issues associated with data silos that often plague storage managers. You can group and abstract the objects an application needs, including volumes, host mappings and snapshot policies into a storage partition. This means you only need to manage a single object, the storage partition, while the automation learns and works in the background to apply your policies to the objects it contains. The storage partition provides swift data mobility across the Flash Grid to help reduce the complexity of managing storage, including creating highly available links between storage sites locally and globally.

Flash Grid can also protect data by replicating it between different systems during any migration, automatically re-establishing the paths between the application and the data location and updating associated snapshots and disaster recovery policies to help get systems back online in the event of any downtime.

With Hybrid cloud and AI continually accelerating digital transformation initiatives, simplifying your storage management with Flash Grid Architecture and Storage Partitions offers a fundamental foundation for managing your data lifecycle strategies now and in the future.

Contributed by IBM.