Happy Valentines Day, everyone! Or, as Tim Ferris prefers to call it, [National Singles Awareness Day].

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

Tags:  disk