to Tony Pearson
The Tony Pearson Daily
Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for the IBM System Storage product line at the
Today, I'll cover the announcements related to our IBM System Storage N series disk systems, which ties inwith Valentines Day theme nicely. The phrase we use for "unified storage" is that N series allows you to "share the closet, not necessarily the clothes". Couples recognize the value of a shared closet over having one closet for just the man's clothes, and a separate closet for just the woman's clothes. (For some couples, the man's closet would be terribly under utilized!). By analogy, the N series allows you to share one solution for LUNs that can be accessed via FCP or iSCSI protocols, and NAS file systems that can be accessed via NFS and CIFS protocols. In most data centers, Windows and UNIX applications are about as likely to share files as men and women are to wear each other's clothes, so the analogy is in tact.
Let's take a look at what got announced:
- N7700 and N7900
There are actually [eight new high-end N series] models. the N7900 has 4 processors and 32GB of cache. The N7700 has 2 processors and 16GB cache. Each has two appliance models (A11 single node and A21 dual node) and two gateway models (G11 single node and G21 dual node).
The appliance models support both FC and SATA disk. The N7900 A models support a maximum of 1176 drives; the N7700 A models supports 840 drives. The gateway models provide FCP, iSCSI and NAS host access through external disk attachment. The N7900 gateway models support 1176 LUNs on external disk systems; the N7700 gateway models support 840 external LUNs.
- N series now supports 1 TB SATA disk
The [EXN1000 expansion drawer] can now have up to fourteen 1TB SATA drives. This is in addition to previousannouncements supporting 500GB and 750GB drive capacities. These drawer support the entire N series line.
With 1 TB drives, the N7900 now supports up to 1176 TB of raw capacity, which is over 1PB of usabledata in 12+2P RAID-DP mode. This is greater than the internal disk capacity limits of current IBM DS8000, EMC DMX andHDS USP-V models.
At the low end, both the N3300 and N3600 now support 500GB, 750GB and 1TB SATA drives in addition to the SASdrives they supported.
- SnapManager for Microsoft SharePoint
There is a new SnapManager in town. This one is for Microsoft SharePoint data. See the announcementfor the [N3300 and N3600] for details.
- Distribution Channels
On Jan 24, IBM signed agreements with [Ingram Micro, Tech Data, and Synnex], to distribute the N Series products and work with IBM to recruit new solution providers to the line. These three are all well-respected world-class distribution providers, so weare glad to have increased our partnership with them on this.
For more on the Feb. 12 announcements, see the [IBM Press Release].
technorati tags: Singles+Awareness+Day, FCP, iSCSI, NAS, NFS, CIFS, N7700, N7900, A11, A21, G11, G21, appliance, gateway, SATA, FC, SAS, disk, storage, drives, N3300, N3600, IngramMicro, TechData, Synnex, RAID-DP, DS8000, EMC, DMX, HDS, USP-V
Comments (2)
There's something unwholesome in reading a slanging match between two employee bloggers on behalf of multi-billion dollar corporations.<div> </div> Tony, I appreciate your efforts in developing this informative and interesting IBM storage blog.<div> </div> "The storage anarchist", you should show more self respect and try not to present such a "bought and paid for" opinion.
For the record, NetApp has supported AIX for years - longer than you've been OEM'ing their products, in fact. NetApp customers have been able to connect their pSeries servers both as an NFS client and as an FCAP-connected hosts. I note that it was more recently that IBM updated their p Seires iSCSI driver to work with NetApp Filers... (http://publib16.boulder.ibm.com/pseries/en_US/infocenter/base/new.htm) but again, that does not appear to be limited to the N Series.<div> </div> And thanks for confirming what I already knew - IBM changes to the NetApp code aren't available only to N Series customers, they are indeed folded back into the same product those customers could buy from NetApp. It would make no sense for it to be otherwise.<div> </div> Just like the changes IBM helps EMC make to our products to support pSeries and zSeries (et al).<div> </div> On that note, I apologize to you and your readers if you've been offended. My observations aren't intended as personal attacks. <div> </div> I am only pointing out that posts like these are frequently misleading, if not outright misrepresentations of the truth, which tend to benefit IBM and/or berate EMC every time. Whether that is intentional or accidental, I admittedly cannot say. If I wrongly indicted your intentions, again, I am sorry.<div> </div> Remember, this started with my observation that IBM doesn't "support" 1TB SATA drives in either of the storage products it manufactures itself. A fact still true today - can't wait to see if that changes on the next Tuesday-is-IBM-Announcement-Day.