Enterprise Storage Forum content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
IBM made news at both ends of its product line today with the introduction of ProtecTIER data deduplication appliances for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and a set of management tools, higher capacity points and a new XIV gateway for its massive Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) platform.
On the SONAS front, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced automated, policy-driven, file-level tiering, a feature Big Blue previewed in February. The tiering capability allows clients to automatically move files in and out of internal SAS/SATA storage pools and external tape storage pools based on policies.
The SONAS cluster independently scales both capacity and performance while providing parallel access to data and a global name space that can manage billions of files.
The policy engine in SONAS can scan billions of files in minutes, according to Brad Johns, storage marketing manager, IBM. Each SONAS node can scan 10 million files per minute and multiple nodes can scan in parallel. SONAS then performs actions such as data migration, backups or deletions based on policies.
IBM is also introducing SONAS support for the IBM XIV Storage System via the new SONAS gateway. IBM XIV clients can now use some or all of the available storage in XIV for network file serving using the SONAS gateway. With this support, all SONAS capabilities can be used with XIV.
“We have clients that have implemented XIV as their primary storage and interested in using SONAS so we will be shipping a unique configuration of SONAS without disks to support that configuration,” said Johns. “Replacing the disk in SONAS with a SAN configuration provides a unified storage solution with a single namespace for SONAS file systems and XIV as the back-end storage.”
The SONASpolicy engine will be available as a no-charge software update for existing clients on August 13.
In addition, IBM is now offering 600GB SAS drives that provide a 25 percent capacity boost to the system. And a new asynchronous replication feature for SONAS offers clients disaster recovery and business continuity between two SONAS systems at any distance.
For SMB customers, IBM has once again extended the ProtecTIER data deduplication technology it acquired from Diligent Technologies to another part of its storage portfolio.
The company is now offering the IBM System Storage TS7610 ProtecTIER Deduplication Appliance Express, a pre-configured, bundled system with server, storage and ProtecTIER deduplication technology that can support 135TB or more backup data on a single terabyte of disk; reduce the bandwidth needed to electronically replicate the data by 95% or more, according to Johns.
Follow Enterprise Storage Forum on Twitter
