Enhanced DS3200 for Boot and Data storage

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Well, it's Tuesday again, and that means more IBM announcements!

Today, IBM announced the enhanced IBM System Storage DS3200 disk system.It is in our DS3000 series, the DS3200 is SAS-attach, DS3300 is iSCSI-attach, and DS3400 is FC-attach. All of them support up to 48 drives, which can be a mix of SAS and SATA drives.

The DS3200 supports the following operating environments (see IBM's [Interop Matrix] for details):

• Microsoft Windows
• Linux (both Linux-x86 and Linux on POWER)
• AIX
• Sun Solaris
• VMware
• Novell NetWare

With today's announcements, the DS3200 can be used to boot from, as well as contain data. This is ideal to combine with IBM BladeCenter. With the IBM BladeCenter you can have 14 blades, either x86 or POWER based processors, attached to a DS3200 via SAS switch modules in the back of the chassis.

Let's take an example of how this can be used for a Scale-Out File Services[SoFS] deployment.

Servers

First, we start with servers. We can have either three [IBM System x3650] servers, but this would use up all six of the direct-attach ports. Instead, we'll choose the [BladeCenter H chassis], with three HS21 blades for SoFS, and that leaves us with eleven empty blade slots we could put in a management node, or other blades to run applications.

SAS connectivity modules

The IBM BladeCenter [SAS Connectivity Module] allows the blade servers to connect to a DS3200. Two of them fit right in the back of the BladeCenter chassis, providing full redundancy without consuming additional rack space.

DS3200 and EXP3000 expansion drawers

We'll have one DS3200 controller with twelve internal drives, and three expansion EXP3000 drawers with twelve drives each, for a total of 48 drives. Using 1TB SATA, this would be 48 TB raw capacity.

The end result? You get a 48TB NAS scalable storage solution, supporting up to 7500 concurrent CIFS and NFS users, with up to 700 MB/sec with large block transfers. By using BladeCenter, you can expand performance by adding more blades to the Chassis, or have some blades running SAP or Oracle RAC have direct read/write access to the SoFS data.

Just another example on how IBM can bring together all the components of a solution to provide customer value!

technorati tags: IBM, DS3200, BladeCenter, Linux, AIX, Windows, Solaris, VMware, NetWare, POWER, SAS, EXP3000, SATA, CIFS, NFS, SoFS