The trickle-down effect of enterprise IT is as old as business technology. Vendors have long aimed new innovations at enterprises whose deep pockets and desire for competitive advantage will lead them to pay a premium for shiny new products. Over time and with the help of constant technological evolution, yesterday’s leading-edge solutions are reconfigured and repackaged for smaller companies with tighter budgets.
That dynamic has played out time and again across enterprise tech, but recent developments, including the Covid-19 pandemic, have hastened the speed and urgency of the process, especially in data storage. Companies of all sizes are struggling to effectively manage increasingly massive amounts of business information both on premises and in often sprawling hybrid cloud environments. What are vendors doing to help these customers?
Early this morning, IBM made an online announcement about new storage products that aim to meet the growing data needs of smaller businesses.
The FlashSystem 5200 is a high-speed, entry-level flash storage system that will be generally available in March, followed by hybrid cloud and container-centric updates.
The company states that the 5200 will be available at a base price that is, on average, 20 percent less than its predecessor, depending on configuration.
The 5200 will start with 38TB of data capacity and can grow up to 1.7PB in a 1U form factor, offering 66 percent greater maximum I/Os than its predecessor and 40 percent more data throughput at 21GB/s.