IBM manual Series, Solution IBM System Storage N7000

The solution: IBM System Storage N7000

series

The IBM System Storage™ N7000 series systems are intended to help IT organizations tackle the challenge of effective data management using virtu­ alization technology and a unified stor­ age architecture. The N7000 series is designed to deliver high-end enterprise storage and data management value with midrange affordability. Built-in enterprise serviceability and managea­ bility features help support your efforts to increase reliability, simplify and unify storage infrastructure and maintenance, and deliver exceptional economy.

The N7000 series, like all N series sys­ tems, provides powerful virtualization and thin-provisioning capabilities designed to maximize storage utilization and staff productivity while minimizing the use of power, cooling and floor space. Staff productivity can be enhanced by an integrated suite of application-aware manageability soft­ ware that can provide policy-based automation to otherwise manual tasks.

The IBM N7000 series is designed to provide remarkable versatility by unify­ ing FC SAN, iSCSI SAN, NAS, primary, nearline and regulatory compliance data

retention and archival storage in a sin­ gle integrated architecture. N series systems are designed for easy installa­ tion, configuration, management and expansion. The combination of versatil­ ity and simplicity of N series systems is intended to help IT professionals respond quickly to changing business needs.

The N7000 series combines the bene­ fits of a unified storage architecture suite of application-aware software with massive scalability, which is intended to provide an ideal platform for large-scale data center applications and storage consolidations.

Designed to support scalability, versatility,

flexibility, reliability and availability with

outstanding value

Scalability. The N7000 series is designed to meet the massive storage scalability and I/O scalability needs that are critical in large data center environ­ ments. The N7900 system can be con­ figured with 1.176 PB of raw storage capacity using up to 1,176 disk drives. The N7700 system can support 840 TB of capacity using as many as 840 disk drives.

Both the N7900 and the N7700 sys­ tems offer high-bandwidth controller designs, which can be in an active- active configuration. Each system offers sixteen 4-Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) ports and twelve Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports standard with the system’s ten PCI-e and six PCI-x expansion slots that can accommodate quad-port

4-Gbps FC adapter cards and ten GbE adapter cards. For additional connectiv­ ity, the N7000 series can expand to a maximum of 56 Fibre Channel ports and 52 Ethernet ports.

Versatility. The unified storage archi­ tecture of the N7000 series can help eliminate the need to manage separate NAS and SAN storage by providing concurrent support for block and file protocols via Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces. With support for Fibre Channel and SATA hard drives, the N7000 product line also has the flexibility to be used for primary and secondary tiered storage.

Storage provisioning can take hours on other storage systems but with N series system’s thin provisioning capabilities provided by FlexVol®, volumes can be expanded and contracted automatically without IT staff intervention or disruption to applications.