In the world of big data, storage plays a major role in how the enterprise can move forward with deriving insight into the business. IBM Corp. is making tape cool again with storage products that offer scalability, reliability and security at a lower price point.

The company is also promoting “Flape” as the combination of tape, flash and software-defined storage as a low-cost solution.

“We have created a management layer that supports Flape across the tape portfolio to consume applications at a higher level,” said Calline Sanchez (pictured), vice president of enterprise storage development at IBM.

Sanchez spoke to  John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during IBM InterConnect 2017 held in Las Vegas, NV, to discuss how tape is back in a big way.  (*Disclosure below.)

The combination of these technologies accelerates storage performance and efficiency, by moving data-at-rest to tape, and speeds up the active data in a Flash environment. Flape results in lower costs for the customer as Flash storage is still at a higher price point.  

Tape and flash: a powerful combination

“Believe me, tape is sexy,” commented Sanchez. Tape ties into her work with flash and the IBM DS8000 data systems, allowing customers to choose from hybrid flash, all-flash or a traditional disk configuration.

“We have an enterprise-monolithic system that covers six nines [99.9999 percent] of availability,” Sanchez said.

IBM believes flash is relevant and is investing heavily in the new systems. The company recently announced it’s new product line with offerings covering the enterprise, midrange and entry-level devices that are all flash.

As a result, the business impact of the DS8000 data systems is twofold. The systems provide much more efficient data storage and additional benefits of functionality, Sanchez explained. The importance being to enable big data and Internet of Things to use the intelligence garnered from the vast amount of data. Sanchez translates that to improving client value.

Especially relevant is the goal is to build upon these systems to offer autonomic systems with self-healing capabilities. Using the resources of IBM’s cognitive platform Watson to optimize the tools, Sanchez hopes to build better systems. Her clients are shifting their focus to cognitive and artificial intelligence.

“So using the cognitive systems or AI as a foundation, we’re thinking about how to build intelligence into our systems. It’s almost like a system that has its own the brain … whether its 6 core or 8 core. How big of a brain do you want?” she asked.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. (*Disclosure: SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE is a media partner at InterConnect. Neither IBM nor other conference sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE