IBM System Storage DCS3860 Controller

The IBM DCS3860 Storage System includes the features below.

It is the next generation in controller technology designed to meet the need for scalable bandwidth requirements for high-performance streaming applications, such as HPC, rich media, weather forecasting, seismic processing, and life sciences research.

DCS3860 is an affordable storage platform capable of supporting up to 60 drives within a 4U enclosure. A complete system configuration consists of one DCS3860 controller and five EXP3800 or DCS3700 expansion units. Since each expansion unit supports 60 drives, a complete DCS3860 system can scale up to 360 drives.

With 6TB high-capacity nearline SAS disk drives, the DCS3860 can deliver up to 2.16PB of physical capacity within a 24U space. The controller and the expansion unit support intermixing of SSD, high-performance SAS, and nearline SAS drives. A DCS3860 storage system can support a maximum of 120 SSDs.

Standard memory cache on the DCS3860 is 24GB, with 12GB per controller. The storage system provides eight 12GB SAS host interfaces (four per controller) and delivers performance read cache to enable the utilization of SSDs for accelerating reads from the storage, helping to increase performance for analytics and high-performance computing environments.

In order to ensure data integrity, the DCS3860 enables flexible levels of RAID protection (0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10), and also includes DDP for simplified installation, greater data protection, and more consistent performance than traditional RAID options.

Planned availability date: June 5, 2015

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IBM DCS3860 RAID Controller
4U, 60 bays for SAS drives, scalable to 1.44PB in 24U