TS7740 and TS7720 Virtualization Engine enhancements

Last week, there were also some announcements on the Virtualization Engine with the release of Version 1.7. The announcements were on enhancements on the TS7740 (ZG10-0183), enhancements on the TS7720 (ZG10-0178) and the withdrawal of the replaced generation of cache controllers and cache drawers on the TS7740 and TS7720 (ZG10-0182).

The TS7740 Virtualization Engine has been around for some time now and was first announced with a capacity of 6TB (one cache controller (CC6) and three cache drawers (CX6) each with a capacity of 1.5TB with 16x146GB drives). By the end of 2008 these were replaced by one cache controller (CC7) and a maximum of 3 cache drawers (CX7) each with a usable capacity of 3,5TB (16x300GB drives) giving a total capacity of 14TB.
Now these features are also withdrawn from marketing and they're replaced by one new cache controller (CC8) and an optional 1 or 3 cache drawers (CX8). As the new 600GB drives are used each can have a usable capacity of approximately 7TB giving a maximum capacity of 28TB.

The TS7720 Virtualization Engine (the driveless one) started out in 2008 with one cache controller (CS7) and 3 or 6 additonal cache drawers (XS7). They used 1TB drives, each with a usable capacity of 10TB and a maximum capacity of 70TB. They could of course also be put into a grid adding up to 210TB.
Now we see a new cache controller (CS8) and an upgrade of the cache drawers (XS7). We are now using 2TB drives doubling the raw capacity and bringing the usable capacity to just under 24TB for the drawers and about 19TB for the controller. You can add the drawers one by one with a maximum of 6. This gives you a maximum capacity of 163TB.
But there's more. You can now also add an additonal Expansion Frame to the TS7720. This frame consists of minimally 2 cache controllers and an optional additonal 10 cache drawers. This gives the frame a maximum capacity of 278TB. Combined with the base frame, a single TS7720 may now have a maximum of 441TB.

Check out the announcements for more details and possible intermixing with existing configurations.
One more thing : the new TS7700 Virtualization Engines now ship with 16GB of physical memory instead of 8GB.

Planned availability : June 4, 2010