Bringing Cyber Resilience to Entry Storage Systems – IBM FlashSystem 5045

For several years now IBM FlashSystem have been leading the way with the ‘born on the mainframe’ IBM Safeguarded Copy (SGC) solution for primary data. Hopefully you should know all about this, but if not, have a look back here. SGC allows you to make regular immutable snapshots on the same storage as your production data, meaning you can quickly recover in the event of the worst happening. The primary differentiator here is the ability to reverse copy the snapshot with instant accessability, rather than having to perform a mass restore event from backups, cloud or tape. When did anyone last test or time a full ‘minimum viable business’ restore from backup?!

Anyway, today IBM introduced the FlashSystem 5045 entry storage system with enterprise capability, courtesy of IBM Storage Virtualize software that now means you can run SGC on the SAS based 5045 entry systems.

The 5045 is a natural evolution from the 5035 but also adds full feature licenses machine code. This simply means that all functions are included in the base license, so snapshots, replication etc all inclusive. In addition, Expert Care support bundles including Advanced are used to provide the hardware and software support over the life of the box.

Technical Details

With the added support of SGC, using the new Policy based Snapshot functionality with inbuilt scheduling and the ability to integrate with external orchestration tools such as IBM Copy Services Manager or IBM Copy Data Management, your ransomware protection is set and forget. Setup your policy, choose your frequency and retention period and the system takes care of the rest.

IBM Storage Sentinel

SGC is the base building block that provides you with a safe immutable copy should you need it, but wouldn’t it be great if you could also validate the copies of your data are good… IBM Cyber Vault architectures allow you to do just that. Cyber Vault is a methodology, a blue print if you like for what you need to do in 2023 to be Cyber safe in terms of your primary data storage. I’ve been doing lots of research for what the competition are doing here, and while there is a lot of talk, not many people have functions that can be run within a clean room type environment.

Enter IBM Storage Sentinel. With AI driven scanning, Sentinel is application aware. That is, it fundamentally is trained on specific application workload and access characteristics and can detect anomalies that would otherwise go undetected. Today Sentinel has native scan support for Epic (Cache/Iris), SAP HANA and recently Oracle

Back to the 5045

In order to make the 5045 support SGC and the new Policy Based Snapshot technology we needed to upgrade the internal cluster state machine to the new “large” CSM model, this meant making a few tweaks elsewhere to save some internal memory. We’ve reduced the total addressable capacity of the 5045 from 32PB to 8PB (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 5035 with that much storage attached anyway!) and based on customer usage data we’ve reduced some of the SAS chain lengths, i.e. number of expansions that can be attached. Again, as people move to larger capacity drives, and Flash drives, we see less and less expansion attachment overall.

In other news…

The FlashSystem 9500 has also had a slight tweak and that too is now available as 100% license machine code vs Software feature license. This is more of an internal change and doesn’t affect the end user, other than it helps to normalise the list price of the features, including a normalising of the FCM list prices across 5200, 7300 and 9500.

On the topic of FCM’s I did notice a recent article over on blocks and files where they have been overdosing on that orange-kool-aid again… a few sideways remarks like “oh IBM has those FCMs too” … but in reality our FCM technology is years ahead of those orange folks, and while we could easily produce some 77 and 144TB modules today – the market sweet-spot is still the 19.2TB modules… when people need them, we will provide!