We are family ! – Meet the IBM Storwize Family

One code base – One CLI – One GUI – One set of functions ! – IBM Storwize Family

IBM Storwize® V3500 (China only) – Specification here

IBM® Storwize® V3500 delivers affordable, entry storage in a compact 2U rack mount design:

Dual-active intelligent array node canisters with 8 GB cache
Four 1Gb iSCSI host ports standard with eight optional 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC) host ports
Support for twelve (3.5-inch) or twenty-four (2.5-inch) dual-port, hot-swappable 6Gb SAS drives
Rich set of standard functions, including virtualized internal storage, thin provisioning, data migration, and data replication
Innovative, intuitive web-based graphical user interface (GUI) for easy system setup and management
Three-year warranty with customer replaceable units (CRU) and on-site service, along with optional warranty service upgrades

Highlights

IBM Storwize V3500 is the newest addition to the family of entry disk systems. Designed to complement IBM System Storage® DS3500, Storwize V3500 delivers easy-to-use, entry-level configurations designed to meet the modest budgets of small and medium businesses.

Storwize V3500 features dual node canisters and 8 GB of cache packaged in a compact, 2U 19-inch rack mount enclosure. Host attachment is provided through four 1Gb iSCSI ports, with eight 8Gb FC ports available as an optional feature.

Storwize V3500 is offered in two models:

Storwize V3500 LFF Control Enclosure supports up to twelve 3.5-inch (large form factor) high-capacity, low-cost nearline disk drives, providing up to 36 TB physical capacity within a single enclosure.
Storwize V3500 SFF Control Enclosure supports up to twenty-four 2.5-inch (small form factor) drives. Both high-performance and high-capacity nearline disk drives are supported, providing the flexibility to address performance and capacity needs within a single enclosure.

Both models support dual-port, hot-swappable 6Gb SAS disk drives, and drives of the same form factor can be intermixed within an enclosure.

As a member of the Storwize family, Storwize V3500 leverages proven IBM Storwize V7000 and IBM SAN Volume Controller functions, management, and interoperability, including:

RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 for data protection
Virtualization of internal storage to enable rapid, flexible provisioning and simple configuration changes
Thin provisioning for improved storage utilization
FlashCopy® to create instant copies of data for backup or application testing
One-way data migration to easily move your data onto the Storwize V3500 system
Innovative and easy-to-use management capabilities with an embedded GUI
Extensive interoperability support with support for most major server platforms and operating systems

Get more information here

IBM Storwize® V3700 – Specification here

Easy-to-use, affordable disk storage with advanced capabilities for small and midsize businesses and remote data centers.

Easily deploy and manage through the intuitive GUI
Ensure continuous data access with nondisruptive migration
Benefit from advanced functionality and reliability usually found only in more expensive systems

Highlights

Easily managed and deployed system with embedded graphical user interface based on the IBM® Storwize® interface design
Experience rapid, flexible provisioning and simple configuration changes with internal virtualization and thin provisioning
Have continuous access to data with integrated nondisruptive migration

Protect data with sophisticated remote mirroring and integrated IBM FlashCopy® technology
Benefit from advanced functionality and reliability usually only found in more expensive systems

Features dual controllers with up to 180 TB of capacity and 8 GB of cache packaged in a compact, 2U 19-inch rack-mount enclosure
Scales up to 120 2.5-inch disk drives or 60 3.5-inch disk drives with four expansion units
Provides host attachment through 1 Gb iSCSI ports (standard), with support for 10 Gbps, Fibre Channel over Ethernet and 8 Gb Fibre Channel available as options
Helps reduce power consumption with energy-saving features

Organizations of all sizes are faced with the challenge of managing massive volumes of increasingly valuable data. But storing this data can be costly, and extracting value from the data is becoming more and more difficult. IT organizations have limited resources but need to stay responsive to dynamic environments and act quickly to consolidate, simplify and optimize their IT infrastructures. The new IBM Storwize V3700 system provides a smarter solution that is affordable, easy to use and self-optimizing, enabling organizations to overcome these storage challenges.

Storwize V3700, the most recent addition to the IBM Storwize family of disk systems, delivers efficient, entry-level configurations specifically designed to meet the needs of small and midsize businesses. Designed to provide organizations with the ability to consolidate and share data at an affordable price, Storwize V3700 offers advanced software capabilities usually found in more expensive systems.

Get more information here

IBM Storwize® V7000 & IBM Storwize® V7000 Unified – Specification here

IBM® Storwize® V7000 and Storwize V7000 Unified are virtualized storage systems designed to consolidate workloads into a single storage system for simplicity of management, reduced cost, highly scalable capacity, performance and high availability. They offer improved efficiency and flexibility through built-in solid state drive (SSD) optimization, thin provisioning and non-disruptive migration of data from existing storage. They can also virtualize and reuse existing disk systems offering a greater potential return on investment. Storwize V7000 and V7000 Unified now supports integrated Real-time Compression, enabling storage of up to five times as much active primary data in the same physical space for extraordinary levels of efficiency.

Highlights

Deliver sophisticated, enterprise-class storage functionality for businesses
Support your growing business requirements while controlling costs
Provide up to 200 percent performance improvement with automatic migration to high-performing solid-state drives (SSDs)¹

Enable storing up to five times more active primary data in the same physical disk space using IBM® Real-time Compression™²
Consolidate block and file storage for simplicity, greater efficiency and ease of management
Enable near-continuous availability of applications through dynamic migration

Easy-to-use data management designed with a graphical user interface and point-and-click system management capabilities
Metro Mirror and Global Mirror for replicating data synchronously or asynchronously between systems for backup efficiency
SSD for applications that demand high speed and quick access to data
RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10

Consider the challenges that IT organizations typically face in these complex environments. Sharing storage among servers is often impossible, but relieving the problem by deploying tiered storage can be difficult. Isolated server and storage management tools reduce IT productivity, but when data migration processes are implemented, they can disrupt business operations. Meanwhile, organizations are concerned about the growing costs of storage and storage management. And they often are unable to use virtualized storage as they use virtual servers, as a tool to optimize expenditures, resources and capabilities.

In storage management today, breaking the cycle of increased complexity and explosive data growth can be a big challenge. The old ways of buying and managing storage have become less effective. Due to resource constraints—both physical storage resources and human resources—IT organizations must act quickly to optimize and simplify their infrastructure. Unchecked complexity and growth will only become bigger problems over time.

To stand up to these challenges and allow businesses to respond to a rapidly changing marketplace, IBM Storwize® V7000 and Storwize V7000 Unified are virtualized storage systems to complement virtualized server environments that provide unmatched performance, availability, advanced functions and highly-scalable capacity never seen before in midrange disk systems. As members of the IBM Storwize family, Storwize V7000 and Storwize V7000 Unified are powerful midrange disk systems that have been designed to be easy to use and to enable rapid deployment without additional resources. Storwize V7000 supports block workloads, whereas Storwize V7000 Unified consolidates block and file workloads into a single storage system for simplicity of management and reduced cost. Storwize V7000 and Storwize V7000 Unified are virtual storage systems that offer greater efficiency and flexibility through built-in SSD optimization and thin-provisioning technologies. Integrated IBM Real-time Compression enhances efficiency even further by enabling storing up to five times as much active primary data in the same physical disk space. Storwize V7000 and Storwize V7000 Unified advanced functions also enable nondisruptive migration of data from existing storage, simplifying implementation and minimizing disruption to users. Finally, these systems also enable you to virtualize and reuse existing disk systems, supporting a greater potential return on investment (ROI).

Get more information here

IBM Flex System Storwize® V7000 Storage Node – Specification here

Automate and speed deployment with integrated storage for the IBM® PureFlex™ System or IBM Flex System™
Simplify management with an integrated, intuitive user interface for faster system accessibility
Reduce network complexity with FCoE and iSCSI connectivity
Store up to five times more active data in the same disk space using IBM Real-time Compression™
Virtualize third-party storage for investment protection of the current storage infrastructure
Optimize costs for mixed workloads, with up to 200 percent better performance with solid-state drives (SSDs) using IBM System Storage® Easy Tier®¹
Improve application availability and resource utilization for organizations of all sizes
Support growing business needs while controlling costs with clustered systems
Get innovative technology, open standards, excellent performance, and a broad portfolio of proven storage software, hardware and solutions offerings from IBM

Highlights

More than 70 percent of IT budgets are spent on operations and maintenance.System administrators face extraordinary demands as they plan IT infrastructures. But they also need to deploy assets to meet current needs and optimize them for maximum performance. More and more organizations are virtualizing their IT environments, and administrators face the daunting task of monitoring a complex infrastructure and fixing problems as they arise. These tasks may be complicated by multiple, non-integrated tools that offer limited automation and the explosion of data that is stressing limited resources—budget, people, power, storage capacity and floor space.

To meet today’s complex and ever-changing business demands, you need a solid base of compute, storage, networking and software resources that is simple to deploy and can quickly and automatically adapt to changing conditions.

Get more information here

IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller – Specification here

Manage heterogeneous storage from a single point of control
Move data among virtualized storage systems without disruptions
Store up to five times¹ as much active data in the same physical disk space using IBM Real-time Compression
Simplify storage infrastructure with support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol
Optimize solid-state storage deployments automatically with IBM System Storage® Easy Tier®
Allow for non-disruptive scalability from the smallest configuration to the largest
Implement stretched configurations for high availability and data mobility between data centers

Highlights

Are your storage requirements growing too fast? Are the costs of managing this growth taking more and more of your IT budget? Would you like to make a better use of existing storage without adding more complexity to the infrastructure? IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller can help solve these problems and get you on the road toward a more flexible, responsive and efficient storage environment. SAN Volume Controller is designed to deliver the benefits of storage virtualization in environments from large enterprises to small businesses and midmarket companies.

Easy to implement

IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller software is delivered preinstalled on SAN Volume Controller Storage Engines so it is quickly ready for implementation once the engines are attached to your storage area network (SAN). SAN Volume Controller Storage Engines are based on proven IBM System x® server technology and are always deployed in redundant pairs, which are designed to deliver very high availability.

SAN Volume Controller is designed to take control of existing storage, retaining all your existing information. This ability helps speed and simplify implementation while helping to minimize the need for additional storage. Once SAN Volume Controller is implemented, you can make changes to the configuration quickly and easily as needed.

SAN Volume Controller uses a completely new graphical user interface modeled on the IBM XIV® Storage System, which has been very well received by customers. The user interface is designed to be very easy to use and includes many built-in IBM recommendations to help simplify storage provisioning and enable new users to get started quickly.

Plugins to support Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and VMware vCenter help enable more efficient consolidated management in these environments.

Extraordinary storage efficiency

At a time when IT budgets are under tremendous pressure yet requirements to store data are growing inexorably, the need to focus on improving storage efficiency is greater than ever. SAN Volume Controller deploys technologies in concert to deliver extraordinary levels of storage efficiency, including thin provisioning and IBM Real-time Compression.

IBM Real-time Compression is designed to improve efficiency enabling you to store up to five times as much data in the same physical disk space by compressing data as much as 80 percent. Unlike other approaches to compression, IBM Real-time Compression is designed to be used with active primary data such as production databases and e-mail systems, which dramatically expands the range of candidate data that can benefit from compression. By significantly reducing storage requirements, you can keep more information online, use the improved efficiency to reduce storage costs, or achieve a combination of greater capacity and reduced cost.

Server attachment

SAN Volume Controller provides great flexibility in storage networking support. Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocols may be used to connect to servers and storage whereas support for iSCSI protocols provides another option for server attachment that can help reduce costs and simplify server configuration.

Complement server virtualization

Server virtualization helps speed provisioning of new server images because provisioning becomes a software operation rather than requiring hardware changes. Similarly, provisioning with SAN Volume Controller is achieved with software and thin provisioning, and is designed to become an almost entirely automated function. Without SAN Volume Controller, server provisioning could be slowed by the need to provision storage.

Support for VMware vStorage APIs enables SAN Volume Controller to take on some storage-related tasks that were previously performed by VMware, which helps improve efficiency and frees up server resources for other more mission-critical tasks.

Functions such as vMotion support application mobility between physical servers. Similarly, SAN Volume Controller is designed to support non-disruptive data migration between storage systems. In addition, SAN Volume Controller helps make storage potentially available to all attached servers, greatly increasingly the flexibility for using vMotion. Without SAN Volume Controller, use of vMotion could be limited by storage being dedicated to specific servers.

Because SAN Volume Controller appears to servers as a single type of storage, virtual server provisioning is also simplified because only a single driver type is needed in server images, which also simplifies administration of those server images. Similarly, SAN Volume Controller eases replacing storage or moving data from one storage type to another because these changes do not require changes to server images. Without SAN Volume Controller, changes of storage type could require disruptive changes to server images.

Server virtualization helps increase flexibility and reduce costs for disaster recovery by enabling the use of different physical configurations at production and recovery sites. Common virtual server configurations are used on these different physical infrastructures. Similarly, SAN Volume Controller supports the use of different physical storage configurations at production and recovery sites yet helps create the same virtual configuration at each site. Without SAN Volume Controller, production and recovery site physical storage configurations would need to be similar, potentially increasing costs.

The IBM FlashCopy® snapshot replication function can be used to help reduce storage requirements when cloning boot drives for multiple virtual servers. When using this function, additional storage is used only for differences among servers instead of needing storage for each boot drive.

Many customers run mixed environments with a variety of virtualized and non-virtualized servers and expect to do so for years to come. SAN Volume Controller provides an external storage virtualization function that operates in a consistent manner and provides consistent services for all attached servers, regardless of whether or not those servers are virtualized. In contrast, server-based storage virtualization techniques differ from server to server which makes mixed environments more complex, rather than less.

Reduce storage used for copies

The SAN Volume Controller FlashCopy snapshot replication function is designed to dramatically reduce storage requirements when copying data by using additional physical storage only for the differences between source and target and not for the entire target volume capacity.

This capability can be used to help reduce storage requirements for test environments that are copied from production data. For example, SAP users often maintain multiple copies of production data for testing. Using the FlashCopy snapshot replication function to maintain these test environments can help significantly reduce the amount of physical storage required.

Enhanced data mobility for high availability

Clients are increasingly deploying virtualized servers using PowerVM, VMware, and other technologies in high availability configurations, including multisite clustered implementations. Such configurations provide attractive options for high availability and load balancing.

To enhance this capability, a SAN Volume Controller cluster can also be installed in a stretched configuration where a single SAN Volume Controller cluster supports storage and servers in two data centers. In this configuration, SAN Volume Controller enables a highly-available stretched volume to be concurrently accessed by servers at both data centers. When combined with server data mobility functions such as VMware vMotion an SAN Volume Controller stretched cluster enables non-disruptive storage and virtual machine mobility between the two data centers. Depending on application performance requirements, SAN Volume Controller stretched clusters may be deployed between data centers up to 300km apart.

SAN Volume Controller stretched clusters may be combined with SAN Volume Controller Metro Mirror or Global Mirror to support a third data center for applications that require both high availability and disaster recovery in a single solution.

Improve energy efficiency

Many data centers today are focusing on reducing their energy usage to reduce costs and out of concern for the environment. SAN Volume Controller can be a key tool to help you improve the energy efficiency of your data center. It does so in several significant ways:

1. SAN Volume Controller is designed to migrate data from older to newer disk systems without disruption to applications, which helps make it easier and quicker for you to implement more energy efficient storage.

2. SAN Volume Controller is designed to simplify implementation of a tiered storage infrastructure and improve performance of lower tier storage, which helps optimize the mix of storage you deploy and may enable greater use of lower tier storage.

3. IBM Real-time Compression with SAN Volume Controller can help increase the effective capacity of storage up to five times¹ and reduce requirements for additional storage in the future, which can help reduce the total amount of physical storage required and so helps reduce energy use. The thin provisioning and “snapshot” functions are designed to extend this benefit even further.

4. The IBM Easy Tier function automatically moves more active data to solid-state drives, which helps enable use of fewer, more energy efficient disk drives to reduce energy consumption.

Technology designed for a dynamic infrastructure

IBM offers a rich, diverse and integrated array of virtualization solutions, spanning from x86 systems to IBM System z® mainframes to storage virtualization with SAN Volume Controller and beyond. Furthermore, IBM can work effectively with you to develop key business strategies and processes to capitalize on those solutions’ benefits—all while guided by established best practices.

With IBM’s help, businesses today can leverage the many engaging opportunities virtualization technologies present in enhancing every aspect of how IT works in the overall organization.

Get more information here