New Systems to Accelerate Smarter Computing
IBM’s new midrange disk system with built-in storage efficiency capabilities helps companies tackle big data issues
IBM South Africa announced its focus on introducing Smarter Computing technologies with the initial introduction of new server and storage technologies to help clients increase IT capacity and increase storage efficiencies.
As the world’s increasing demand for data and services puts a strain on IT resources, organisations become trapped in a vicious cycle in which a rigid IT infrastructure and lack of trusted data leads to reactive or risky decision making. Attempts to overcome these challenges through additional IT investments often result in a more sprawling and costly infrastructure.
The new offerings, including a new midrange disk system with built-in storage efficiency capabilities, address these challenges with smarter computing technologies to integrate storage, optimise systems and virtualise data centers.
“The old ways of buying and managing storage have become less effective. Due to resource constraints—both physical storage resources and human resources—IT organisations must act quickly to optimise and simplify their infrastructure. Unchecked complexity and growth will only become bigger problems over time.” says Bevan Lock, Midrange Disk Storage Product Manager for IBM Systems Group in South Africa.
Small and midsize organisations typically suffer from a range of challenges including:
• Disruptive migrations
• Difficulty deploying tiered storage
• Inability to share storage among servers
• Reduced productivity and increased cost caused by isolated server and storage management tools
• Inability to use virtualised storage, like virtual servers, as a tool for optimising expenditures, resources and capabilities
To stand up to these challenges and allow businesses to respond to a rapidly changing marketplace, IBM Storwize V7000 Unified is a virtualised storage system to complement virtualised server environments that provides unmatched performance, availability, advanced functions and highly scalable capacity never seen before in midrange disk systems.
Storwize V7000 Unified is a powerful midrange disk system that has been designed to be easy to use and enable rapid deployment without additional resources. Storwize V7000 Unified consolidates block and file workloads into a single storage system for simplicity of management and reduced cost.
The IBM Storwize V7000 system incorporates some of IBM’s top technology, typically found only in enterprise-class storage systems, raising the standard for storage efficiency in midrange disk systems.
Fast
The IBM Storwize V7000 system helps organisations deploy solid-state storage confidently, effectively and economically. The IBM Storwize V7000 system provides the following performance features:
• Proven industry benchmarks
• Multiple storage tiers
• Performance management
• Storage virtualisation
• System Storage Easy Tier technology that provides automated storage tiering for solid state drive (SSD) optimisation
Easy
The IBM Storwize V7000 system simplifies storage management with a powerful, easy-to-use interface that can help organisations improve storage performance, efficiency, and utilisation rates while improving storage administrator productivity. The IBM Storwize V7000 system includes the following features for ease of use:
• Preinstalled software
• Simplified provisioning
• Online data migration
• Simplified remote mirroring
• Simplified application performance tuning
• Event monitoring
Efficient
The IBM Storwize V7000 system integrates top IBM storage efficiency technologies into a modular design that simplifies the addition of more storage technologies. Greater efficiency translates into reduced energy costs, reduced administrative costs and less storage sprawl. The IBM Storwize V7000 system efficiency highlights include the following:
• Storage virtualisation
• Thin provisioning
• Space-efficient FlashCopy
• Cross-tier data migration, mirroring and FlashCopy
• Storage resource management
Cost-effective
The IBM Storwize V7000 system has a dynamic, modular, compact design that sets a new standard for cost-effective midrange disk systems. Instead of buying a whole cabinet and then filling it with disk enclosures over time, the IBM Storwize V7000 system uses individual, modular components providing organisations with reduced space requirements and more flexibility. Capacity and functionality can be added as needed, over time and with less disruption than with traditional midrange disk systems.
IBM introduced the IBM Storwize V7000 midrange storage system in October 2010 and the systems sold out in the fourth quarter, with IBM shipping more than 1,000 systems to customers. IBM announced that the Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Leipzig, Germany, selected the Storwize V7000 to manage the torrent of data flowing into its organisation so it can be swiftly delivered for workloads like genetic research.
