Today, businesses face many challenges that relate to the demand for system storage. The emphasis on customer service continues to fuel the need for timely access to increasing amounts of information.
Internet-based applications and data warehousing-based applications continue to increase the demand for storage. IBM i meets these challenges by increasing storage at reduced cost and offering ultra-fast performance options. With this in mind, IBM has two great storage solutions: native integrated disk storage and IBM® Storage Systems® SAN solutions, giving customers state of the art technologies and a choice for their storage needs.
Disk
IBM i takes advantage of existing system structure to provide storage as an integral part of its offering: designed, built and tested as a unified entity, and leveraging the strengths of the entire system and its I/O subsystems to deliver the best cost and performance possible. IBM i storage comprises a highly optimized design that accommodates a wide range of application requirements and their varying storage needs. More importantly, it provides customers a choice to select their storage connectivity based on their business and application requirements:
Integrated direct attach storage, highly optimized for IBM i.
SAN attached external storage IBM i connects a wide range of IBM System Storage offerings.
Tape
IBM i offers several flexible options to facilitate various backup and business continuance requirements. The solutions range from easy to use cost-effective devices such as DVD-RAM through to high performance tape solutions such as the IBM® TotalStorage® Ultrium UltraScalable Tape Library 3584 (TS3500) or IBM Automated Tape Library 3494.
IBM Tape offerings incorporate the latest, state-of-the-art, innovative technology to ensure that save and restore operations are completed in a timely manner, with the highest data integrity and reliability. IBM i provides two flexible solutions:
- Integrated internal tape offering that are physically enclosed in the system or the I/O expansion towers. Devices such as LTO, 4mm DAT and DVD-RAM offer a reliable low-cost save restore solution and facilitate data distribution between all levels of IBM i.
- High speed tape offerings that are attached through an I/O adapter, providing a solution for high volume, high performance save and restore automation.
Power Systems exploits the bandwidth of high speed system links (HSL or 12x), CPU parallelism, and high performance tape devices attached through SCSI, SAS and fibre channel to provide significant performance throughput improvements for save and restore operations.
Storage Area Networks
A storage area network (SAN) is a dedicated, centrally managed, secure information infrastructure, which enables any-to-any interconnection of servers and storage systems. Storage architectures such as the DS8000 series or IBM® System Storage® Ultrium (LTO) and IBM Enterprise Tape Libraries can be connected directly to the Power Ssystem through fibre channel adapters, or through a SAN fabric.
SAN support
Optical storage
IBM i optical storage options include easy to use cost-effective devices such as DVD as well as attachment of IBM 3995/3996 and third party optical library devices for archive, imaging, and document storage. Additional optical storage options include virtual devices with image catalog or network backed optical volumes and physical optical devices hosted by other IBM i partitions.
I/O
IBM i continues to exploit the I/O architecture, introduced first on the AS/400 systems, aimed at providing high performance scalability while maintaining the flexibility required to infuse new technologies into the product as they became available. Since that time, this flexibility has been leveraged on numerous occasions. The main system I/O bus named the High Speed Link (also known as HSL, Remote I/O or RIO bus) has a sustained throughput of 1GB/s in both directions.
In addition to the long standing industry standard Peripheral Component Interface (PCI-X) bus controllers, Power Systems IBM i offers many adapters in the PCI-e standard. PCI-e stands for Peripheral Component Interface - express and doubles the last version of PCI-X speed from 2GB/sec to 4GB/sec.
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