DS8000 Announcements

There have been a couple of announcements concerning the DS8000. First of all there's the predictable withdrawal of the 73GB 15.000 rpm disks (ZG08-0743). The withdrawal will be effective March 27, 2009.They are replaced by 146GB disks.

On the other end of the scale, there's the new 450 GB 15.000 rpm Fibre Channel Disk Drives with the following announcement : 'IBM System Storage DS8000 series delivers new flexibility and data protection options' (ZG08-0394 for the 242x series, ZG08-0369 for the 2107).
Here's an overview of the new features :

• RAID-6: Allows for additional fault tolerance by using a second independent distributed parity scheme (dual parity).
• 450 GB 15,000 rpm Fibre Channel Disk Drive - Provides additional capacity and another price/performance option for transaction processing workloads
• Variable LPAR: Provides the ability for Dual DS8000 images where one image has more processor and cache than the other for increased flexibility.
• Extended Address Volumes: Extends the addressing capability of System z^tm environments to support volumes that can scale up to approximately 223 GB (262,668 cylinders). This capability can help relieve address constraints to support large storage capacity needs.
• IPv6: The IBM System Storage DS8000 has been certified as meeting the requirements of the IPv6 Ready Logo program, indicating its implementation of IPv6 mandatory core protocols and the ability to interoperate with other IPv6 implementations.

Extended Address Volumes had already been previewed, so what jumps most to my attention is Raid-6 and Variable LPAR. The RAID-6 capability requires new device adapter cards, but there's some good news : "For DS8000 machines already installed, a feature conversion to the new device adapter cards will be available at no additional charge". Variable LPAR adds a 25/75 percent split to the former 50/50 percent split.

IBM also mentions the intention to provide 1 TB 7,200 RPM SATA disk drives at the beginning of 2009.

The Data Sheet has also been updated.