The IBM System Storage DS8000 series often gets overlooked as new products enter the market at rapid pace, but the high-performing system has more to offer than ever before.

“A huge percentage of the world’s data processing runs through the DS8000,” said the system’s Business Line Executive Jeff Barber to theCUBE during IBM Edge2015. “The banks and the insurance companies live for it.”

New capabilities for DS8000 and DB2

This quarter, IBM brought new innovation to the DS8000, particularly designed with z/OS in mind. Barber said that IBM is introducing 16 gigabit-per-second interfaces on PhyCon.

“That will be supported in zHPF,” he said. “We’ve also introduced new capabilities for DB2. You’re going to be able to get 60 percent improvement in megabytes-per-second transfer and a 60 percent reduction in latency. The OLPTs benefit and the analytic queries benefit a great deal, so it’s a boon to our customers on the high end.”

Barber would like to see more customers use the DS8000 in innovative ways for maximum performance with significant cost savings. “Use the DS8000 as the back end to your scale-out Cloud-scale storage farm,” he said. “Sooner or later the price of near-line SaaS is going to be too much, and tape will always undercut it. Think about how you can move data off the spinning disk, onto tape, and you’ll undercut your competitors. The winners are going to get tape; the losers won’t.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge2015.