IBM System Storage N series Gateway

Highlights

• Multiprotocol storage environment provides single access for network attached storage and storage area network storage environments
• Versatile, integrated architecture supports concurrent block I/O and file serving over Ethernet and Fibre Channel storage area network infrastructures and optimizes investment protection and return on investment
• Storage consolidation is designed to enable organizations to consolidate UNIX, Linux, Microsoft Windows and web-based workloads with your existing storage area network
• Comprehensive software suite provides robust system management, copy services, virtualization technologies, and disaster recovery and backup capabilities across all storage area network resources

Improving storage use and access

As enterprise storage requirements evolved from direct-attached to networked storage, many enterprises made significant investments in multiple storage architectures—direct-attached storage (DAS), storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS)—to support the different access methods required by various business solutions. The result was often inefficient and underused storage environments. Today, a critical IT management challenge is to optimize the use of existing storage to improve efficiency and return on investment (ROI) while continuing to support different access methods for different business solutions throughout the enterprise.

You may not be ready to replace existing storage systems with new, file-based ones. Instead, you might be looking for ways to broaden the use of current infrastructure and improve return on investment by provisioning SAN capacity for new business solutions requiring Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) or NAS access and remote access.

IBM System Storage N series Gateway

The IBM® System Storage® N series Gateway product line is a network-based unified storage solution designed to provide IP and FCP access to SAN-attached heterogeneous storage arrays. The IBM System Storage N6000 and IBM System Storage N7000 series systems ordered with a Gateway feature code helps make the most of your dynamic provisioning capabilities of Data ONTAP software across your existing Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure to support an expanded set of business applications. The N series Gateway is based on the Data ONTAP microkernel operating system, which is designed to unify block and file storage networking paradigms under a common architecture. The N series Gateway offers a comprehensive suite of advanced data management capabilities designed to help you consolidate protect and recover mission-critical data for enterprise applications and users.

N series Gateway systems are designed to deliver the performance and capacity to meet access requirements for enterprises of all sizes. They are intended to deliver industry-leading performance, offer terabytes of managed capacity, and be configured for simultaneous active/active access with secure failover across two independent systems in a cluster.

The N6000 and N7000 series Gateway product lines support the attachment to both N series native disk shelf EXN1000, EXN3000, EXN3500 and EXN4000 disk storage expansion units, and gateway storage including IBM Enterprise Storage Server® (ESS) series, IBM XIV® Storage System, IBM System Storage DS8000® and DS5000® series; as well as a broad range of EMC, Hitachi, Fujitsu and HP storage subsystems. You can now take advantage of the N series Gateway capabilities to improve business efficiency and reduce data management complexity with a variety of storage subsystems.