IBM DCS3700 and DS3500 New Features

IBM DCS3700 and DS3500 New Features

 

IBM’s DCS3700 and DC3500 storage systems fit into the entry and midrange portfolio of IBM’s block based (SAN) storage products respectively. The DS3500 series is designed to offer midrange performance and scalability at a lower price point than the competition to bring the benefits of shared block storage to the smaller businesses or remote offices. Its functionality has evolved over time since the first DS3000 incarnation, as has its management interface, meaning the latest DS3500 series offers substantially more to users than the DS3000 series of old, in terms of usability, scalability, performance and functionality. Each system can support up to 192 drives, with different types and sizes all intermixed across one logical system.

 

The DCS3700 series is designed to embrace the new era of “big data”. Offering a drive density of 60 3.5” NL-SAS, SAS and SSD intermixed drives in just 4U of space, each system scales to 360 drives or 1.44 Petabytes of capacity in just 24U of rack space. While these systems are optimised for applications with high performance streaming data requirements, and offering more I/O performance and cache than the DS series, they run the same system code and as such are managed in the same way and have similar functionality. Furthermore these systems can offer further value when virtualised behind an IBM Storwize V7000 to take advantage of the “per tray” licensing model.

 

 

Both of these systems have recently been considerably enhanced since the release of firmware 7.84 (or later) managed with Storage Manager 10.84 (or later). The new code brings not only new functionality, but some fundamental changes in how the storage can be provisioned allowing for notable performance enhancements and massively reduced rebuild times in the event of disk failure.

 

Key Benefits

 

• Dynamic disk pools (DDP): An alternative to conventional arrays, D-chunks are used for data, parity and hot spare capacity and spread across much larger pools of disks than arrays use and so not only offer greater performance and space utilisation, but massively quicker recovery times as re-builds are not limited to a single disk, but all disks in the pool.

 

• Thin-provisioning: This further enhances utilisation by capacity only being used when data is actually written as oppose to just storage presented.

 

• IP Replication: Supported in addition to fibre channel mirroring of data to a second system for disaster recovery, this allows conventional TCP/IP networks to be used for data replication.

 

• Performance Read Cache: Allows a small number of SSD disks to be installed and act as a cache layer so hot-data is migrated to the faster disks from the higher-capacity disks, all seamlessly and automatically with no administrator input required.

 

• VAAI and ALUA support: Allows for increased performance and data-path integrity in virtualised environments.

 

• Simplified Offering Structure: More features included in the base licence (partitioning, FlashCopy and Volume Copy) and additional features supplied in performance, backup or DR options. Alternatively all functionality can be realised with a single super-key.
 

Edward Yates - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited
 

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