Major Storage Announcements

Today, IBM made some significant storage announcements in different fields. In this post I'll give you a first reference to some of the most important announcements and the major topics of these announcements.

XIV : Next generation open storage (ZG09-0529 - ZG09-0530)

• The IBM XIV Storage System Model A14
• Ranging from 72 to 180 1 TB SATA drives providing a usable capacity from 27 to 79 TB.
  
• Up to 24 ports of 4Gb Fibre Channel host connectivity
• Up to 6 ports of 1Gb iSCSI connectivity
• Advanced functions such as synchronous remote mirroring, thin provisioning, data migration, and writeable snapshot technology
• New flexible 3 year and 1 year hardware warranty options
• Statement of Direction : "By the end of 2009, IBM plans to deliver asynchronous mirroring capabilities on the IBM XIV Storage System".
• "XIV offers dual processors enabling up to 30% higher performance for some workloads".
• Planned availability : August 13, 2009
  

DS8000 R4.3 : Premier mainframe storage (ZG09-0497 - ZG09-0498)

• Thin Provisioning for Open Systems. "Thin Provisioning allows you to overcommit storage to specific devices and throughout the system in general (...) Thin provisioned devices offer performance that is comparable to standard, fully allocated, logical devices". As indicated : initially only for open systems. Thin provisioning requires an extra license which is announced separately (ZG09-0499 - ZG09-0500).
  
• Faster LUN initialization " improves initialization speeds up to 2.6 times over previous versions of the DS8000"
• Enhancement to High Performance FICON for System z enables higher throughput. zHPF Multitrack support means applications can read or write more than one track's worth of data in a single transfer, removing potential I/O bottlenecks.
• Planned availability for plant and field install : August 21, 2009
  

TS7650 ProtecTIER Gateway & Appliance Edition V2.3 : Data Deduplication enhanced with optional replication functionality (ZP09-0250 - ZP09-0258)

• Native IP-based Replication Capability : "ProtecTIER's IP replication function addresses two of the biggest requirements in a deduplication environment today : DR capabilities and offsite storage/archival. ProtecTIER IP replication provides a simple and affordable, over-the-WAN method to move data to a remote DR site, and supports tape archiving capabilities outside of the primary production environment".
• "Scalability options to address the storage needs of different sized customers"
• Inline deduplication delivers faster throughput, up to 1,000 MB/sec.
• Planned availability : September 4, 2009

You see, lots of announcements. I left out the 8Gb SAN switch announcements like e.g. the SAN384B. If you want to have a complete overview, you can also go to the storage page of IBM giving lots of information on the new announcements.


There is also one withdrawal that certainly draws our attention. It's the IBM System Storage DS8000 series Model 9B2 and selected features (ZG09-0521). Effective December 31, 2009, IBM will withdraw from marketing the following products:

• Model 9B2 on machine types 2421, 2422, 2423, and 2424
• Internal Management console
• Microcode Bundle Family - Release 4 Bundle Family
  
• All 2Gb FICON Adapters
  
• ESCON cables and ESCON adapters

All have replacements, but if I read this correctly ESCON is completely abandoned on the DS8000 as the only replacements indicated are FICON !