Hey everyone, its Tuesday, and that means IBM announcements!

Last October, IBM [unveiled their plans to take over the world] of archive solutions, and today, we make good on that threat with the announcement of the [Information Archive (IA) v1.1].

(Insert evil villain laugh here)

To avoid overwhelming people with too many features and functions, IBM decided to keep things simple for the first release. Let's take a look:

Frames

The base frame (2231-IA3) supports a single collection, from as small as 3.6 TB to as large as 72 TB of usable capacity. You can attach one expansion frame (2231-IS3) that holds two additional collections, 63 TB usable capacity for each collection. Disk capacity is increased in eight-drive (half-drawer) increments of 3.6 TB usable capacity each. A full configured IA system (304 drives, 1 TB raw capacity per drive) provides 198 TB usable capacity.

Of course, that is just the disk side of the solution. Like its predecessor, the IBM System Storage DR550, the IA v1.1 can also attach to external tape storage to store and protect petabytes (PB) of archive data.  Hundreds of different IBM and non-IBM tape drives and libraries are supported, so that this can be easily incorporated into existing tape environments.

Protection Levels

Each collection can be configured to one of three protection levels: basic, intermediate, and maximum.

• Basic protection provides RAID protection of data using standard NFS group/user controls for access to read and write data. This can be useful for databases that need full read/write access.  Users can assign expiration dates, but in Basic mode they can delete the data before the expiration date is reached.
  
• Intermediate adds Non-Erasable Non-Rewriteable (NENR) protection against user actions to delete or modify protected data. However, similar to IBM N series "Enterprise SnapLock", intermediate mode allows authorized storage admins to clean up the mess, increase or reduce retention periods, and delete data if it is inadvertently protected.  I often refer to this as "training wheels" for those who are trying to work out their workflow procedures before moving on to Maximum mode.
  
• Maximum provides the strictest NENR protection for business, legal, government and industry requirements, comparable to IBM N series "Compliance SnapLock" mode, for data that traditionally were written to WORM optical media. Data cannot be deleted until the retention period ends.  Retention periods of individual files and objects can be increased, but not decreased.  Retention Hold (often referred to as Litigation Hold) can be used to keep a set of related data even longer in specific circumstances. 
  

You can decide to upgrade your protection after data is written to a collection. Basic mode can be upgraded to Intermediate mode, for example, or Intermediate mode upgraded to Maximum.

Protocols

To keep things simple, v1.1 of the Information Archive supports only two industry standard protocols: NFS and SSAM API. The NFS option allows standard file commands to read/write data. The System Storage Archive Manager (SSAM) API allows smooth transition from earlier IBM System Storage DR550 deployments. With this announcement, IBM will [discontinue selling the DR550 DR2 models].

As we say here at IBM, "Today is the best day to stop using EMC Centera." For more information, see the IBM [Announcement Letter].

technorati tags: IBM, IA, archive, 2231-IA3, 2231-IS3, protection, protocols, NFS, SSAM, API, EMC, Centera, DR550

Tags:  2231-is3 nfs ia protection 2231-ia3 ibm api centera archive dr550 emc ssam protocols