Monday, 20 May 2013
IBM upgrades storage portfolios, adds inline compression
By Lucas Mearian, Computerworld (US) | Jun 7, 2012
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PrintIBM Monday unveiled upgrades to its line of storage products that it said adds more support for cloud technologies. For instance the upgrades include the addition of compression capabilities to the midrange V7000 array and the company's storage virtualization appliance.
In all, under its Smarter Computing Initiative, IBM announced upgrades or new services for 12 storage products.
The upgrades include implementation services for IBM's flagship, grid-based XIV Gen 3 storage system and the N3000 line of NAS storage arrays.
"Enterprises are dealing with data that is increasing exponentially in both size and complexity," said Rod Adkins, senior vice president of the IBM Systems & Technology Group. "The enhanced systems and storage solutions we're announcing today have the performance, efficiency and intelligence to handle this big data. This is smarter computing that allows our clients to organize and analyze their data to better understand and serve their customers."
The upgrades include the integration of real-time compression with the StorWize V7000 midrange storage array and its SAN Volume Controller (SVC) storage virtualization appliance. The new feature compresses data by up to 80%, increasing storage capacity by as much as five times, IBM said.
The compression algorithm also addresses production data, not just low-activity data on the appliance, a dramatic change from past iterations.
The V7000 and SVC updates include the addition of support for the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol, which will allow administrators to converge storage and common server data traffic over LANs for ease of management and lower costs, IBM said.
IBM also boosted capacity on its Storwize V7000 through clustering technology, that allows twice as many drives to managed under a single interface. Now, up to 960 drives or 1.4 petabytes of capacity can be managed in a V7000 array.
