IBM System Storage DS8000

Highlights

• Performance: Exceptional, scalable performance with the latest hardware advancements and innovative software functionality
• Availability and resiliency: Extraordinary system availability with full hardware redundancy, built on the market-proven IBM Power Systems architecture
• Optimised storage tiering: Optimise performance by automating placement of data across the appropriate drive tiers dynamically
• Scalability: Systems can scale up to over 1,500 drives with a combination of different drive tiers
• Flexibility: Address the broad scope of storage workloads that exist in today’s complex datacentre.

The IBM System Storage DS8000 offers high performance, high capacity, secure storage systems that are designed to deliver the highest levels of performance, flexibility, scalability, resiliency and total overall value for the most demanding, heterogeneous storage environments.

World-class performance to help optimise responsiveness in an on-demand world

The DS8000 series is built on innovative and market-proven IBM POWER microprocessors in dual two-way or dual four-way shared Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) complexes. The latest DS8800 model offers a new generation of microprocessors and is the fastest disk system in the IBM storage portfolio. With dual IBM POWER6+ controllers, 8 Gigabits per second (Gbps) host and device adapters and 6 Gbps serial attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives, the DS8800 delivers breakthrough performance in a design that condenses more data in a smaller footprint.

The IBM POWER6+ controllers are complemented by two additional tiers of high performance processors within the system’s host and device adapters. These three processor tiers work together to deliver the DS8000’s extraordinary, balanced performance.

The efficiency of a storage system’s cache can also greatly improve I/O performance, as well as reduce the system’s overall cache requirements. The caching algorithms in the DS8000 series are designed to intelligently and dynamically adapt system caching to the specific needs of the current workload. This is intended to help the system deliver an unimpeded flow of information for outstanding throughput. One example is the Intelligent Write Caching algorithm that combines and balances the benefits of existing read and write caching algorithms to determine how the write cache should be managed for optimal throughput. Another example is the Adaptive Multistream Prefetching (AMP) algorithm that is designed to dramatically improve performance for sequential and batch processing applications, such as data backup, business analytics and data warehouse workloads.

In addition to the exceptional value it provides for all server environments, the DS8000 offers special value for selected IBM server environments. The Co-operative Caching and I/O Priority functions can help enable greater cache efficiency and performance for higher priority IBM DB2 applications running on IBM Power Systems with the IBM AIX operating system. DS8000 integration with IBM Open HyperSwap can provide an outstanding high availability (HA) solution for AIX environments. The DS8000 also excels in optimising storage for IBM System z environments with a variety of unique performance, availability and scalability features that can help you maximise the potential of your mainframes. Recent System z optimisation enhancements include I/O Priority Manager support System z volumes and innovative capabilities to support High Performance FICON for System z (zHPF), IBM HyperSwap and IBM Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS), as well as Extended Address Volumes (EAV) support for up to 1 TB volumes.

Despite their distinct hardware components, both the DS8800 and DS8700 models ship with a common microcode built on over ten years of market-proven reliability. This common microcode not only reinforces our commitment to world class system reliability, it also enables the availability of innovative functions on both the DS8800 and DS8700 hardware platforms concurrently. DS8700 clients will appreciate investment protection for their deployments and all DS8000 clients will continue to enjoy the interoperability of remote mirror and copy functions across older DS8300, DS8100 and IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) models. You want long-term value – and that’s what DS8000 delivers.

Make business continuity a reality with HA architecture

The DS8000 series is designed to help address the needs of dynamic enterprise environments requiring the highest levels of availability. It is designed to support dynamic system changes, such as online system microcode updates and online hardware upgrades. This flagship high-end system also features redundant, hot-swappable components to help support continuous operations and is designed for greater-than-five-nines availability1, which makes the DS8000 series an ideal storage platform for supporting today’s around-the-clock, global business environment.

All disks are RAID-protected, such that multiple spare disks are configured in a RAID group to allow a failed disk to be rebuilt quickly and automatically to maintain access to information. The DS8000 series supports RAID-5, RAID-6 and RAID-10 configurations for added flexibility. In addition, each DS8000 system is built to monitor its own internal functions, so it can ‘call home’ automatically to alert service personnel if it detects a potential problem arising. Sophisticated Light Path Diagnostics facilitate system maintenance. The DS8000 series also offers an audit log security function designed to log changes made by administrators to aid in root cause analysis.

In addition to its exceptionally resilient architecture, the DS8000 series offers an array of advanced functions for data backup, remote mirroring and disaster recovery (DR). The IBM FlashCopy feature addresses a key requirement for continuous data availability by quickly and efficiently creating asynchronous point-in-time copies without impeding the related application server. That is, when a copy of data is requested, both the source data and its copy are available for use almost immediately. These copies can be used for backup, application or quality assurance testing or other purposes. The optional IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager can help deliver the highest levels of data protection for mission-critical IBM DB2, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server applications via integrated application-aware point-in-time backup and restore capabilities. This is achieved through the exploitation of the DS8000’s advanced FlashCopy technology to create a high performance application data protection solution.

The DS8000 series also includes advanced two-site and three-site business continuity capabilities to give you the peace of mind of knowing your mission-critical applications will be available when you need them during both planned and unplanned system outages. IBM Metro Mirror is designed to provide a no-data-loss remote mirroring environment for metropolitan distances up to 300 kilometres. IBM Global Mirror is designed to minimise data loss at the recovery site to as low as five seconds or less, relative to the production site at virtually any distance. IBM Metro/Global Mirror combines these two capabilities to support a three-site configuration designed for no data loss, regardless of distance. With this type of resiliency and HA, it’s no wonder the DS8000 is considered outstanding to other high-end disk systems when it comes to business continuity and is why clients insist on the DS8000 to support some of their most important business applications.

Adapt to a changing world with exceptional flexibility and scalability

The DS8000 series is known for its unique combination of flexibility, resiliency, performance and scalability, which can help address the many challenges stemming from the exponential growth of data across the enterprise. Savvy businesses are looking for innovative ways to manage and adapt in today’s increasingly competitive, global business environment. The DS8000 series is designed to manage a broad scope of storage workloads that exist in today’s complex datacentre and do it effectively and efficiently.

To help simplify management and accommodate real-time workload fluctuations, administrators can easily add, delete and dynamically expand storage capacity to address sudden spikes in demand or to react to other environmental changes. Dynamic Volume Expansion and Thin Provisioning are two features that can significantly reduce the time administrators spend provisioning new storage while keeping applications online, which is a key requirement for mission-critical applications.

If your organisation needs the flexibility to run a mix of performance-optimised workloads alongside those that might require less performance, yet still provide the reliability that a high-end disk system affords, the DS8000 can help with that, too. With the capability to adeptly balance workloads across different tiers of drives (i.e., solid state and spinning drives of different rotational speeds), you have all the flexibility to consolidate a variety of disk platforms on a single DS8000 system and the Easy Tier feature makes workload optimisation even easier. Another example of the flexibility and modularity of the DS8000 series is the ability to add expansion frames and increase physical storage capacity within a frame without disrupting your applications.

The DS8000 series also supports a variety of major server platforms, including IBM z/OS, z/VM, Linux® on System z, IBM i, OS/400, i5/OS and AIX operating systems, as well as Linux, HP-UX, Oracle Solaris, Novell NetWare, VMware and Microsoft® Windows® environments, among many others. With such broad platform support, the DS8000 series can easily accommodate a wide array of applications and their distinct service levels.

¹ Five-nines is a term used to denote that a piece of equipment is functioning with 99.999 percent availability