Enterprise IT vendor IBM today said its new software defined storage software products are capable of reducing storage costs by up to 90 percent by automatically moving data onto economical storage device.
IBM said the patented technology codenamed Elastic Storage is suited for data-intensive applications.
Some of the potential use case includes seismic data processing, risk management and financial analysis, weather modeling, and scientific research, determining the next best action in real-time retail situations.
IBM has shared some examples.
Elastic Storage was used for the Jeopardy! television match between IBM’s Watson and two former Jeopardy! champions. For the show, IBM’s Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured data, including the full text of Wikipedia. By using Elastic Storage capabilities, around five terabytes of Watson’s “knowledge” (or 200 million pages of data) were loaded in only minutes into the computer’s memory.
IBM Research has demonstrated that Elastic Storage can scan 10 billion files on a single cluster in 43 minutes.
Elastic Storage also exploits server-side Flash for up to six times increase in performance than with standard SAS disks.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Computational and Information Services Laboratory (CISL), which stores and manages more than 50 petabytes of information between its Wyoming and Colorado centers, uses Elastic Storage.
CISL provides computational, educational, and research data services for geosciences to more than 1,000 users at more than 200 different sites.
Pamela Gillman, manager, Data Analysis Services Group, CISL, said: “The IBM global file system software has enabled scalable, reliable and fast access to this information. That has dramatically improved the performance of the different functions, as well as the organization as a whole.”
Elastic Storage software will also be available as an IBM SoftLayer cloud service later this year, said IBM.
By InfotechLead News Team
