This September, Big Blue will launch two new all-flash arrays, the Storwize V7000F and Storwize 5030F, with prices starting at $19,000.

IBM also announced Flash In, a storage migration program designed to help “Dell and EMC clients” transition to IBM storage solutions as they become cloud businesses.

Cheap, yet flashy 

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“This announcement addresses a clear need for clients that require a substantial increase in storage performance but at a price that’s in line with the reality of today’s data center budgets,” Ed Walsh, GM of IBM storage and software defined infrastructure, said.

“As an essential part of a company’s primary storage strategy, IBM’s new all-flash solutions provide robust security and the reliability that organizations need as they move to cloud and cognitive environments.”

The Storwize products come with Spectrum Virtualize software designed for real-time data compression, thin provisioning and snapshots, working across almost 400 different storage arrays.

IBM said that the Storwize V7000F improves performance by up to 45 percent, when comparing 48-drive all-flash configurations of Storwize V7000 Gen2 using RAID5 with Storwize V7000F using distributed RAID6.

The company added that the flash products are built for workloads like SQL Server and MySQL database management, real-time streaming, and processing of data produced by the Internet of Things.

In 2010, IBM bought Storwize, and three years later announced a billion dollar flash R&D initiative.