IBM Corp. today updated its entry-level flash storage systems with improved price/performance along with hybrid cloud and container-centric capabilities.

The new FlashSystem 5200 is described as offering better performance and capacity than its predecessor, the FlashSystem 5100, at a 20% lower base price. IBM said the unit delivers 66% more maximum input/output operations than its predecessor and 40% faster data throughput.

The system “has a strong focus on edge use cases with a 1U configuration that can store 1.7 petabytes in a grocery store closet or a bank branch,” said Eric Herzog (pictured), vice president of product marketing and management for IBM Storage Systems. “U” is an abbreviation for “rack unit” and refers to a server that is 1¾ inches high.

IBM also expects to sell a lot of the entry-level devices to large enterprises, Herzog said. “The Fortune 500 buys high end, midrange and entry-level products,” he said, with low-end purchases “based on use case, such as an asset database.”

With prices starting as low as $25,000, the 5200 is part of IBM’s strategy of offering “one family for all nonmainframe environments,” Herzog said. That means the subsystem will attach to Windows servers, Linux and even old Unix servers.

The product sports high-end features like 99.9999% availability along with HyperSwap, a feature that provides dual-site, active access to a separate storage volume to enable 100% availability. Another option is “logical air gap,” a security technology in which a good copy of data is kept in a cloud data store for immediate restoration in case of a malware attack. “So far no malware or ransomware has been able to traverse a logical air gap,” Herzog said.

Central to the new round of IBM FlashSystems is support for software containers, which are portable environments that include an application and all its dependent processes. The IBM FlashSystem 5200 supports Red Hat Inc.’s OpenShift software container orchestrator and the Container Storage Interface for the Kubernetes container orchestrator, a standard for exposing arbitrary block and file storage systems to containerized workloads and enabling containerized applications to work with persistent storage. The array also works with VMWare Inc. virtualized and bare-metal environments.

Also included is IBM Storage Insights for managing complex multiplatform storage configurations and IBM Spectrum Virtualize, which enables multiple islands of storage to be consolidated and managed in a single pool. When it becomes available in March, FlashSystems and other IBM storage lines will add support for IBM Cloud Satellite, a technology that the company says will let organizations build, deploy and manage cloud services anywhere – including on-premises – as a unit.

Herzog said Cloud Satellite is analogous to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Outposts, a version of the cloud giant’s EC2 instances that run inside a customer’s data center. Unlike Outposts or the comparable Microsoft Azure Stack, Cloud Satellite is advertised as working with any hardware and storage subsystem, including non-IBM gear.

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