Another feature of the N series Data ONTAP operating system, FlexClone®, enables the nearly instant creation of clones without requiring incremental storage. FlexClone can dramatically accelerate test and development cycles for IT projects.
Efficient consolidation. The N7000 series is designed to consolidate and serve data for a wide variety of workloads, including mission-critical business applications, technical appli cations, databases, e-mail, home direc tories, digital media, backup and recovery, regulatory compliant data retention and archival. IBM N series systems support Windows®, UNIX®, including AIX®, Solaris™ and HP-UX, and Linux® host operating systems as well as VMware for server virtualization.
IT organizations can be challenged with poor response times during peak hours of operations after consolidating stor age systems with dissimilar data work loads on to a single platform. To help address this challenge, N series offers FlexShare quality-of-service software, which is intended to enable storage administrators to set and dynamically adjust workload priorities. FlexShare can help ensure that important applica tions get fast response times.
Application availability. N7000 sys tems combine a variety of features to meet the need for continuous availabil ity. Complementing the high-availability hardware design is the proven reliability of the Data ONTAP operating system and RAID-DP™ (N series implementa tion of RAID-6), which uniquely provides double-level RAID data protection to help ensure that data is not lost in the event of multiple disk drive failures. In addition, RAID-DP has negligible per formance impact. The N7000 also sup ports simple yet powerful synchronous, semi-synchronous and asynchronous mirroring that can be deployed
in one-to-one, one-to-many and many- to-one mirroring configurations.
The N7000 can serve as the foundation for a comprehensive data management solution consisting of hardware, soft ware and services. With an appliance architecture and built-in backup and recovery software, an N7000 solution is designed to address the entire spec trum of data availability challenges while offering value in price/performance and scalability.
Ultimately what matters is application- level availability, and this is where
N series systems excel. Snapshot™, a standard feature of Data ONTAP, makes
it possible to instantly revert to a previous version of data upon failure or user error. N series Snapshot copies are unique in that they can be created frequently during production, because they use only a small amount of incre mental storage and have virtually no impact on performance. Host-based SnapManager® software integrates Snapshot management with applica tions, designed to ensure consistent backup images and application-level recovery in minutes.
Performance. High performance and massive storage capacity are character istics that make the N7000 systems ideal for large-scale applications and storage consolidation. An N7000 sys tem is designed to complete jobs quickly and handle a large number of users via a powerful, high-bandwidth architecture with scalability to
1,176 disk drives capable of delivering up to 1.176 PB of raw storage capacity. With large cache memory configura tions, expandable high-performance I/O, 4 Gbps FC SAN support, 4 Gbps disk drive support and support for
10 Gbps Ethernet, the N7000 delivers exceptional enterprise-class system performance.