Heterogeneous unified storage environment—Designed to provide unified storage access for multiprotocol, multivendor storage environments
Versatile—Single, integrated architecture designed to support concurrent block I/O and file serving over Ethernet and Fibre Channel SAN infrastructures
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 reduce operational cost significantly
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—direct-attached storage (DAS), storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (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) while continuing 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 return on investment by provisioning SAN capacity for new business solutions requiring FCP, iSCSI or NAS access and remote access.
The solution: IBM System Storage N7000 Gateway
The IBM System Storage™ N7000 Gateway product line is a network-based unified storage solution designed to provide Internet Protocol (IP) and Fibre Channel (FC) protocol access to SAN attached heterogeneous storage arrays. The N7000 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 N7000 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 N7000 Gateway is designed to provide a comprehensive suite of advanced data management capabilities to help you consolidate, protect and recover mission-critical data for enterprise applications and users.
The IBM N series Gateway is designed to deliver the performance and capacity to meet access requirements for enterprises of all sizes. N series Gateway systems 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. N7000 Gateways that can offer massive SAN and NAS consolidation are now a reality using multiple N7000 Gateway systems and SAN storage systems configured in a scalable SAN infrastructure.
The N7000 Gateway product line supports the attachment to both N series EXN1000 and EXN4000 disk storage expansion units, as well as a broad range of IBM, EMC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, 3PAR and HP storage subsystems, including the IBM Enterprise Storage Server® (ESS) series, IBM System Storage DS8000™ and DS4000™ series. Clients with these storage subsystems in their SAN environments can now take advantage of the N7000 Gateway capabilities to help improve business efficiency and reduce data management complexity.
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
Multiple supported backup methods including disk- and host-based backup and tape backup to direct, SAN and GbE attached tape devices
Up to 1.176 Petabytes (PB) or 1,176 TB raw storage capacity supported from SAN-based storage resources
16 GB to 64 GB ECC memory
512 MB to 4 GB nonvolatile memory
Up to 52 full-duplex 10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet ports
Up to 56 4-Gbps Fibre Channel ports
10-Gbps Ethernet adapter card (optional)
Quad-port 4-Gbps adapters (optional)
Dual FC LVD SCSI Tape adapter
Dual redundant hot-plug integrated cooling fans and auto-ranging power supplies
