Heterogeneous unified storage environment—Designed to provide unified storage access for multiprotocol, multivendor storage environments
Storage consolidation—Designed to enable organizations to consolidate UNIX®, Linux®, Windows® and Web workloads with existing SAN storage, thereby helping to increase storage utilization
Utilizing existing SAN infrastructure—Designed to integrate into existing SAN storage environments, helping to optimize investment protection and ROI
Data management—Designed to provide advanced data management solutions that maximize availability and can help to significantly reduce operational cost
Comprehensive software suite—Designed to provide robust system management, copy services, virtualization technologies and disaster recovery and backup capabilities across all SAN resources
The challenge: Improving storage utilization and access
As enterprise storage requirements evolved from direct-attached to networked storage, many enterprises made significant investments in multiple storage architectures—DAS, SAN and NAS—to support the different access methods required by business solutions. The result was often inefficient and underutilized storage environments. A critical IT management challenge is to optimize the use of existing storage to improve efficiency and return on investment (ROI), yet continue to support different access methods for different business solutions throughout the enterprise.
File-level usage and distributed enterprise usage of the SAN environment are ways to improve access and use of storage resources. Many enterprises, however, are not ready to replace their existing storage systems with new, unified ones. Instead, companies with extensive SAN storage networks are looking for ways to broaden the use of their infrastructures and achieve a greater ROI by provisioning SAN capacity for new business solutions requiring FCP, iSCSI or NAS data access and remote access.
The solution: IBM System Storage N5000 Gateway
The IBM System Storage™ N5000 Gateway is a network-based solution designed to provide heterogeneous access to Fibre Channel attached storage arrays. The Gateway can help you make the most of the dynamic provisioning capabilities of Data ONTAP® software across your existing Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure to support an expanded set of business applications. The IBM N5000 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 N5000 Gateway features a comprehensive suite of advanced data management capabilities to help you consolidate, protect and recover mission-critical data for enterprise applications and users.
Common features
Hardware summary
Simultaneous multiprotocol support for FCP, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, HTTP, FTP
File- and block-level service in a single system
Data ONTAP® software
16 TB maximum volume size
Broad range of built-in features
Up to 504 TB raw storage capacity supported from SAN-based storage resources
2 GB to 16 GB ECC memory
512 MB to 1 GB nonvolatile memory
10 GbE adapter card (optional)
Quad-port 4 Gbps adapters (optional)
Dual FC LVD SCSI Tape adapter
Diagnostic LED/LCD
Dual redundant hot-plug integrated cooling fans and auto-ranging power supplies
