Compare Storage Hardware and Storage Software

Move up to IBM System Storage

Maximize the benefits of your information infrastructure

Compare Storage Hardware and Storage Software. Learn the benefits of IBM System Storage compared to competitive storage hardware and storage software vendors.

The right storage hardware and storage software are critical to a flexible, on demand IT infrastructure—and to meeting today's growing compliance demands. To help you attain both objectives, IBM offers a wide range of performance and capacity options for data protection, disaster resiliency and metro and global mirroring. IBM's key advantage? Our disk, tape, and software products work together to exploit synergies—such as virtualization—across IBM systems. The benefit for you: higher performance and availability across heterogeneous servers and applications, at lower cost and with less complexity.

IBM's integrated approach to storage hardware and software makes it easy for you to add individual products to your infrastructure, or gain maximum advantage through an end-to-end, scalable solution. Our industry and technical experts are available to create an Information Infrastructure strategy designed specifically for your current and future needs.

Tab navigation

Download a copy of IBM Systems Storage Product Guide for full product details:
Download storage hardware and software (PDF, 109KB) product guide

System Storage N Series: the power of choice; an industry leader in NAS

The IBM® System Storage™ N series products are designed to provide network-attached storage (NAS) for mission-critical data, near-line storage, and WORM-protected data in high-availability, high-capacity and highly-secure environments.

A single operating system across the entire platform
A wide range of network attachment capabilities for a broad range of host and client systems
A multitude of network access protocols, including file system protocols (CIFS, NFS, HTTP, FTP) and block I/O protocols (iSCSI and FCP)
Easy-to-use, powerful software for streamlined administration and operations

Learn more

Features	IBM N series	EMC Celerra	Sun 7000
Integrated Multi-protocol capability	Unified architecture: integrated multi-protocol (CIF, NFS, iSCSI, FC) structure that support simultaneous block (SAN) and file (NAS) access in a single system. There is a single management interface for the entire system. The IBM N series systems are powered by a single storage operating system: Data ONTAP.	EMC uses the term “Celerra unified storage”. However, the product appears to be basically a Celerra NAS gateway and a CLARiiON disk system sold together. FC and IP connectivity are enabled by different storage controllers. Each system has its own microcode. IP interface cables from hosts plug into the Celerra, while Fibre Channel interface cables from hosts plug into the CLARiiON, bypassing the gateway. There are separate management interfaces for the two products: Celerra Manager and CLARiiON Navisphere.	The Sun Storage 7000 systems are IP storage appliances with Solaris-only iSCSI support; they do not support FC host connectivity.
Snapshots	Up to 255 per LUN. N series Snapshot™ technology writes new and changed data in a new location, involving only one operation; as a result less primary storage is required for copies and there are no performance impacts.	Performance impact copying services. SnapSure technology copy-on-first write-snapshots require three I/O operations while N series would need only one.	Performance impact copying services. Storage 7000 systems utilize ZFS-enabled snapshot services (read-only and writable snapshots), that require more I/O operations, than N series which only needs one.
Gateway support	IBM N series gateways support heterogeneous, multivendor storage.	EMC Celerra gateways support only EMC-branded disk systems.	Lacks a gateway offering.
Data Deduplication	Data deduplication integrated for data backup, data archival and primary data. Supported for any interface or protocol NFS/CFS, FCP/iSCSI and NDMP. Available at no extra charge.	Avamar backup and archive technology provides deduplication functionalities for backup data, not supported for FCP/iSCSI.	Storage 7000 systems do not offer data deduplication.
Performance Accelerators	FlexScale software: Performance Acceleration Module (PAM), Optimizes performance for a broad application set.	Costly, Solid State Drives (SSDs, a.k.a. flash drives) support tier 0 storage.	Sun Storage 7000 series file system, ZFS, recognizes I/O patterns and place data in a given storage media with the objective of improve performance.ZFS then executes writes to SSD media, and ZFS flushes the data to SATA disks.
Thin provisioning	Integrated and widely proven thin provisioning capabilities to expand and shrink volumes. Supports both NAS and Fibre Channel accessed volumes. Available at no extra charge.	Celerra AVM virtual provisioning is available at no extra charge. However, Celerra virtual provisioning does not have the ability to shrink volumes. Celerra virtual provisioning supports only hosts attached through the Celerra; thin provisioning for Fibre Channel attached hosts appears to require the CLARiiON Virtual Provisioning feature which is different and priced.	Not native to Storage 7000 systems, enabled by Solaris ZFS.