IBM System Storage DS8000 series

High-performance disk storage for business-critical enterprise workloads

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Highlights

The new IBM® System Storage® DS8870 delivers up to three times performance improvement by leveraging IBM POWER7® technology and up to 1 terabyte (TB) system cache.
Provides extraordinary system availability with full hardware redundancy built on the market-proven IBM Power Systems™ architecture.
Dynamically optimises performance for single- and multi-tiered systems with IBM System Storage Easy Tier® and other self-tuning features.
Enables systems to scale to more than 2.3 petabytes (PB) and support multiple drive tiers.
Optimises the broad scope of storage workloads that exist in today’s complex data centres.

Virtually every organisation in the private and public sector struggles to manage the exponential growth of stored data and the increasing complexity of its IT environments. Managing this extraordinary growth is complicated by the variety of server environments spread across data centres, and each server environment can have a distinct storage system that must be managed separately. As the number of servers grows, managing these disparate storage systems can significantly increase storage costs.

Smarter Storage, such as the IBM System Storage DS8000® series, enables organisations to take control of their storage so they can focus on gaining more valuable insights from their data and delivering more value to their business.

Through its extraordinary flexibility, the DS8000 series is designed to effectively and efficiently manage a broad range of storage workloads that exist in today’s complex data centres. This flagship IBM disk system can bring simplicity to your storage environment by supporting a mix of random and sequential I/O workloads as well as interactive and batch applications, regardless of whether they are running on one of today’s popular distributed server platforms or on the mainframe. With the ability to manage all these workloads simultaneously, this dynamically self-tuning system can greatly reduce the challenge of managing your increasingly complex storage environment as requirements change.

Organisations have the dual challenges of optimizing today’s workloads and preparing for new initiatives. With unprecedented performance and scale for high-growth data centres, the DS8000 series helps you gain the full benefits of smarter computing, clouds, analytics and other initiatives.

The DS8000 series delivers these capabilities with a range of features that provide self-tuning performance through automated storage tiering, automated quality-of-service (QoS) management, as well as broad server support and outstanding scalability. The I/O Priority Manager feature, for example, can dynamically manage the performance of the various applications running on the system through a very easy and intuitive approach. This is especially helpful when you want to consolidate storage workloads and need to ensure that system resources are aligned to the priority of your applications. These advanced features can help your business manage more data for more applications in a smaller footprint, without the constant oversight and manual performance tuning that other high-end storage vendors require.

Common features

IBM System Storage Easy Tier feature automatically helps optimise performance and drive utilisation of multi-tier and single-tier systems.
Flexible drive options include traditional spinning drives of varying rotational speeds and ultra-fast solid-state drives (SSDs).
Advanced management console simplifies and centralises storage management with an easy-to-use graphical user interface.
Fully redundant design and greater-than-five-nines² availability with market-proven IBM Power Systems™ architecture.
IBM FlashCopy®, Metro Mirror, Global Mirror, Metro/Global Mirror and Global Copy provide flexible replication services to address backup and business continuity needs.
High-capacity cache with innovative caching algorithms.
Storage Pool Striping for automatically avoiding disk “hot spots.”
I/O Priority Manager aligns quality-of-service (QoS) levels to separate application workloads in the system.
Advanced integration with IBM server platforms and IBM database software.
Storage efficiency capabilities, including thin provisioning, Easy Tier, Dynamic Volume Expansion and intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
Full disk encryption drive options for advanced protection of data at rest.

Hardware summary

Dual symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) processor complexes
Support for 2 to 32 host adapters and up to 128 Fibre Channel/IBM FICON® host ports
Options include 4-port 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) or 4- and 8-port 8 Gbps Fibre Channel/FICON host adapters
Fibre Channel arbitrated loop or 6 Gbps SAS-2 drive interface options
Minimum of eight drives and maximum of 1,536 drives
Up to 1 terabyte (TB) system memory with innovative caching algorithms
Supports 5 TB to more than 2,300 TB of physical capacity, upgradeable without system disruption

² Five-nines and Six-nines are terms used to denote that a piece of equipment is functioning with 99.999 and 99.9999 percent availability on average.

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