FlashSystem Gets Nearline Boost, Nutanix On Power Gets The Boot
August 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a pretty quiet summer out there in the Big Blue sphere of influence, which includes Power Systems, IBM i, and a few hundred other products and services from IBM and its partners. But in the past several weeks, a bunch of things have happened that we thought you should be made aware of.
On July 21, in announcement letter 120-021, IBM announced that it is now offering a 16 TB 7.2K RPM 12 Gb/sec nearline SAS disk drive option for its FlashSystem arrays. I know what you are thinking – what they heck is a disk drive doing in an all-flash array? Well, earlier this year, as we reported back in February, IBM started phasing out its Storwize hybrid disk and storage arrays and started emphasizing FlashSystem. Elements of both architectures were mixed and matched to create the updated FlashSystem 5100 (formerly the Storwize V5100) and rolled out the FlashSystem 7200 and FlashSystem 9200, which were new. The new disk drive is available in the following systems:
- FlashSystem 5000 models 2H2, 3H2, 12G, and 92G
- FlashSystem 5100 models 12G and 92G
- FlashSystem 7000 models 12G and 92G
Pricing for the disk modules was not available at press time.
In addition, IBM has pulled the plug on a number of things, and a few of them are a little disconcerting to us. The first one, revealed in announcement letter 920-056, is that effective August 11, 2020, IBM will no longer be selling the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) storage on Power Systems. IBM and Nutanix worked together to port the latter’s HCI stack to Linux running on Power and launched special variants of the stack on the Converged Systems series of appliances back in June 2017, which we reported on here. Considering that this announcement was made on July 28, that did not give potential customers much time to hustle and buy more gear. But then again, those that did buy into this IBM Power System-Nutanix hybrid are probably feeling like they were led a bit down the garden path. It could be, by the way, that IBM wants to peddle a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Enterprise Virtualization (the KVM hypervisor), and Ceph object and file storage as an alternative to Nutanix on Power iron. The company doesn’t say. IBM is, however, as we see in announcement letter 920-138, offering support on the Nutanix stack until March 31, 2025, which is about as long as current customers could expect.
