Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Continuing my coverage of the IT Security and Storage Expo in Brussels, Belgium, we had some great storage solutions on display at the IBM and I.R.I.S-ICT booth.

Here my IBM colleague Tom Provost is showing the front of the "Smarter Office" solution. The second photo gives the view from behind. While I always explained the solution from the front of the box, many of the more technical attendees at this conference wanted to inspect the ports in the back.

This sound-isolated 11U solution combines the following:

• The [IBM Storwize V3700] with 300GB small-form-factor (SFF) drives provides shared storage for the servers.
  
  
• Two [IBM System x3550 M4 servers] that can run VMware, Hyper-V or Linux KVM server hypervisor software for your Windows and/or Linux applications. These are two socket servers that can have up to 16 x86 cores each.
  
  
• An [IBM System x3650 M4 server] pre-installed with backup software and an integrated [IBM RDX] removable disk cartridge system. (see 2010 Sep 27 for RDX reference)
  
  
• A Juniper EX2200 switch to network the servers and storage together.
  
  
• A Local Console Manager (LCM) with rackable keyboard, video, and mouse.

In this next example, the IBM team combined a BladeCenter S chassis that can hold six blade servers, with a Storwize V7000 Unified which offers FCP, iSCSI, FCoE, NFS, CIFS, HTTPS, SCP and FTP block and file protocols.

If those configurations are too small for your needs, consider the Flex System chassis or full PureFlex system frame. The rack-mountable 10U chassis can hold the Flex System V7000 and 10 compute notes. The PureFlex frame can hold up to four of these chasses.

IBM and I.R.I.S-ICT also had an IBM XIV Gen3 and a TS3500 Tape library on display.

technorati tags: IBM, I.R.I.S.-ICT, Belgium, Storage, Expo, Tom Provost, SFF, VMware, Hyper-V, Linux KVM, RDX, Veeam, Juniper Networks, LCM, , FCP, iSCSI, FCoE, NFS, CIFS, HTTPS, SCP, FTP, Flex System, PureFlex, PureSystems, XIV Gen3, TS3500, tape library