IBM today announced changes across its product line, touching on everything from high-end storage to SMBs, virtualization and VTLs.
The high-end IBM System Storage DS8000 Turbo series is getting a new storage console, the IBM System Storage Productivity Center, among other features. The new storage console offers a single view into an organization’s storage systems for management and configuration. Charlie Andrews, IBM’s director of system storage product marketing, said the new console will be added to other IBM storage systems to provide a common management infrastructure.
Also new is IBM FlashCopy SE, a new licensed function that lets customers make a space efficient snapshot copy of their data, and Dynamic Volume Expansion, which enables easier online volume expansion to support application data growth.
Storage Pool Striping speeds data access and processing through high-performance data placement, and Adaptive Multi-stream Pre-fetching (AMP) caching technology can double throughput and dramatically reduce processing time for tasks such as data backup, batch processing, business intelligence and streaming media. Also, IBM z/OS Global Mirror Multiple Reader lets IBM System z customers improve throughput for remote mirroring.
IBM said it plans to add thin provisioning to the DS8000 at a later date.
The DS8000 enhancements will be available on Dec. 7. IBM FlashCopy SE has a starting price of $6,500, and IBM System Storage Productivity Center starts at $7,500. The other new features are available at no additional charge.
Andrews said the upgrades give IBM “as strong a portfolio as anyone,” and said the DS8000’s performance is ahead of EMC and HDS “in terms of actual customer loads” (see Hitachi Reopens Benchmark Debate).
Virtual Enhancements
IBM also unveiled the IBM System Storage N series Virtual File Manager, courtesy of its partnership with NetApp, and also refreshed the IBM Virtualization Engine TS7520 tape solution.
The IBM System Storage N series Virtual File Manager (VFM) file virtualization offering comes in both Enterprise and Migration Editions, at a starting price of $2,000 and $1,200, respectively.
The IBM Virtualization Engine TS7520 virtual tape offering now offers 750 GB disk drives and scales to 1.3 Petabytes. It also supports IBM’s encryption capable LTO Gen 4 tape drives. Pricing starts at $104,769.
Small and mid-sized business (SMB) offerings include new functionality across the IBM System Storage DS3000 and DS4000 disk series and IBM System Storage TS2240 Tape products.
The DS3000 series now includes low-cost SATAdrives, so customers can mix SATA and SASdrives, as well as support for IBM System p servers and IBM BladeCenter Power blades.
The DS4000 series received new software functions and features now available in DS4000 Storage Manager Software, including support for RAID 6, among other performance and capacity improvements.
The IBM System Storage TS2240 Tape Drive Express Model LTO 4 Half-High is a high-performance tape storage solution that offers enterprise-level encryption with a small size and low cost, starting at $4,495.