Though technology-savvy organizations like cloud providers are increasingly relying on commodity hardware in their data centers, IBM Corp. is  betting that there is still room for its proprietary flash arrays. The vendor this morning made two new additions to the lineup that incorporate homegrown automation software specifically designed to address the advanced operational requirements of the web-scale crowd.

The first of the speedy systems is the A9000, which comes in the form of a preconfigured appliance that IBM says can be customized according to a customer’s demands before delivery. As such, it’s geared mainly towards midsize organizations with limited resources that don’t wish to devote the precious time of their IT professionals to tweaking their storage gear. Nonetheless, the array could fit relatively easily into a large cloud environment thanks to functionality borrowed from its beefier sibling, the A9000R.

The system boasts a rack-based design that provides the ability to pool multiple units into a petabyte-scale cluster.  According to IBM, the built-in management software removes the need for administrators to manually configure each array and instead handles the chore automatically based on pre-defined operational requirements. From there, the data stored in the implementation can be compressed using another homegrown tool that the company claims is capable of cutting the A900R’s effective price tag to as as little as $1.5 per gigabyte. A complementary capacity tiering capability function makes it possible to increase the efficiency of a deployment even further by taking advantage third party appliances.

A customer could use the capability to route frequently accessed data to its  A9000 or A9000R arrays and have everything else stored on a more affordable disk-based equipment from one of its competitors. IBM says that the software supports more than 300 third party systems, which should accommodate the vast majority of organizations.

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