Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means! IBM Announcements!

Today also happens to be [Election Day] in the United States, and some have questioned IBM's logic of making major storage announcements on Election Day. During the campaigns, a major theme was to help Small and Medium size businesses, because these are the engines of economic growth and improved employment.

To tie in with this Election Day theme, all of today's [storage announcements are designed for Small and Medium size business workloads]! Whether you want to [Move Forward] with new features and functions to help transform your business for the future; [Live Free] with improved flexibility and ease-of-use for your storage infrastructure; adopt a more [Green and Environmentally-friendly] platform; or merely [Take Back Control] of uncontrolled growth in storage expenses, IBM has efficient, easy-to-use storage that fits your budget!

Hopefully, you all saw today's Launch Webcast on these announcements, but in case you missed it, waiting in line at the polling station to cast your vote, or caught without electricity or Internet access from [Superstorm Sandy], it is now available [On-Demand].

Here is a quick recap:

IBM Storwize V3700 Disk System

The latest addition to the Storwize family is the new [IBM Storwize V3700 disk system] which offers a smaller, entry-level version of the amazingly successful IBM Storwize V7000. Here is a quick [3-minute YouTube video]:

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The 2U control enclosure can have up to four additional 2U expansion enclosures, for a maximum of 120 drives, or 180TB of raw disk capacity. Like the Storwize V7000, the Storwize V3700 supports a [large number of servers and operating systems.] Many of the features you already know from the Storwize V7000 are carried forward:

Feature	Storwize V7000	Storwize V3700
Protocols (included)	1GbE iSCSI + 8GbFC	1GbE iSCSI
Protocols (optional)	10GbE iSCSI/FCoE	8GbFC, 10GbE iSCSI/FCoE, Statement of Direction for 6Gb SAS
Cache	8GB per canister	4GB per canister, upgradeable to 8GB
Expansion	Up to 4 control enclosures in a clustered system, each with up to 9 expansion enclosures	Up to 4 expansion enclosures
Maximum Number of drives/TB	960 drives/1.44PB	Up to 120 drives/180TB
RAID levels supported	0,1,5,6,10	0,1,5,6,10
User Interfaces	GUI, CLI, SMI-S API	GUI, CLI, SMI-S API
Thin Provisioning	Included	Included
Virtualization	Internal (included), external (optional)	Internal only (included)
Non-disruptive data migration	Two-directional (included)	One-directional (migrate to Storwize V3700, included)
Easy Tier	included	Statement of direction
FlashCopy	Up to 256 targets (included)	Up to 64 targets (included) Statement of Direction for optional 2,040 targets
Remote Mirror	Metro Mirror and Global Mirror (optional)	Statement of Direction (optional)
Real-time Compression	Optional	Not available

The IBM Storwize V3700 is offered at attractive leasing options through IBM Global Financing.

IBM LTO-6 drives and midrange tape libraries

Last month, IBM's [Tape and Storage Hypervisor Announcements] included LTO-6 for the enterprise-class TS3500 tape library. Today, the LTO-6 support is complete with support for midrange tape drives and libraries.

There are two tape drive models. The TS2260 is based on the half-height drive, intended for occasional 9-to-5 usage. The TS2360 is based on the full-height drive, intended for 24x7 access. These drives can read LTO-4 and LTO-5 tape cartridge media, and can write LTO-5 cartridge media. The new LTO-6 tape cartridge media is expected to be available next month.

In addition to the IBM TS3500 Enterprise Tape Library, LTO-6 is now supported on all of the midrange tape libraries: TS2900, TS3100, TS3200 and TS3310.

IBM Linear Tape File System Library Edition V2.1.2

There are two levels of [Linear Tape File System], or LTFS for short. The first is the Single Drive Edition (LTFS-SDE), which allows you to attach an LTO-5, LTO-6 or TS1140 tape drive to a single workstation, and allow you to mount tape cartridges as easy as mounting USB memory sticks. This presents a full file system view that allows you to read, edit, create, and even drag-and-drop files to other file systems. The LTFS-SDE driver is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

The second is the Library Edition (LTFS-LE), which allows you to mount the entire tape library as a file system. Each tape cartridge in the library is presented as a subdirectory folder, that you can access like any file system on disk. This was only available for Linux systems, which could then export the files through NFS, FTP or HTTP protocols to other clients. Now, with release v2.1.2, LTFS-LE supports Windows servers, so that you can share the files with other clients through CIFS as well.

Whether you are a midsize business looking to expand, or a large enterprise with midsize workloads, these products could be just the right solution for you! To learn more, see the [November 6th Storage Announcement Landing Page].

technorati tags: IBM, LTFS-LE, TS3200, Storwize V7000, LTFS-SDE, TS2900, LTFS, midrange, FlashCopy, TS3500, TS3310, Storwize V3700, TS1140, TS2260, TS2360, LTO-6, TS3100