New IBM DS5000 Series Midrange RAID up to 256TB

IBM System Storage DS5000 series midrange disk offering delivers new high-performance DS5100 and DS5300 storage controllers and high-capacity EXP5000 storage expansion unit.

The System Storage DS5000 series is IBM’s newest midrange disk storage offering, specifically designed to provide solutions to meet the needs of midrange/departmental storage requirements, delivering high performance, advanced function, high availability, modular and scalable storage capacity, with SAN-attached 4 Gbps FC connectivity, and support for RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10, with up to 256 TB physical storage capacity.

DS5000 modular, flexible, and scalable architecture
The DS5300 (1818-53A) and DS5100 (1818-51A) controller models come in 4U rack-mountable enclosures that house redundant, dual-active intelligent RAID controllers designed to provide high availability, and allow modular addition of host port and cache memory building blocks.

The EXP5000 (1818-D1A) storage expansion unit is packaged in a 3U rack-mountable, high-capacity 16-drive bay enclosure containing dual switched 4 Gbps ESMs, dual power supplies, and redundant cooling. EXP5000s connect to DS5000 controllers via high-speed 4 Gbps FC disk expansion ports and have a physical storage capacity of up to 16 TB per enclosure, using 1000 GB SATA DDMs (disk drive modules) and up to 7.2 TB per enclosure, using 450 GB FC DDMs.

The DS5000 modular architecture helps to address the requirement for high-performance storage solutions, providing flexibility, scalability, and investment protection. A design feature of the architecture is to allow for an increase in the number of host ports over time, as well as add or change host port types as higher-speed host ports or new industry standards-based protocol host port types are introduced. At initial introduction, the DS5000 series controllers offer options of eight and sixteen host ports (four ports per controller or eight ports per controller).

Modular cache memory building blocks allow the DS5000 series to meet initial requirements, while providing the means to add more cache memory as needs dictate over time. At initial introduction, the DS5000 series offers 8 GB and 16 GB cache memory options.

Additionally, the DS5100 offers further value in flexibility, scalability, and investment protection with the optional DS5100 Performance Upgrade. The DS5100 provides excellent performance for dynamic storage consolidation solutions beginning deployment stage, with the full assurance that this model can be upgraded to full DS5300 performance level if required.

The DS5100 Performance Upgrade option is designed to provide enhanced storage server processing capability internally within the DS5100 controller. With the DS5100 Performance Upgrade option applied, the DS5100 is designed to provide the equivalent storage server processing capability as the DS5300.

The DS5000 attaches up to 16 EXP5000 Storage Expansion Units, supporting configurations up to 256 TB of FC or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disks. The DS5000 provides further investment protection with the ability to attach up to 16 DS4000tm EXP810 Expansion Units or a combination of up to 16 EXP5000s and EXP810s. This provides a rich set of upgrade paths to extend the DS4000 series installed base of EXP810s, while gaining the modular scalability and high performance built into the DS5000 family.

As part of the base machine functionality, the DS5000 controllers and EXP5000 are designed to support integration and use of up to 256 high-performance Fibre Channel disk drive modules (DDMs), and up to 48 high-capacity SATA DDMs.

When configuring more than 48 SATA DDMs on the DS5000 controllers and EXP5000s, one or more SATA Disk Drive Attachment features must be selected to maintain entitlement and support.

The SATA Disk Drive Attachment features only apply to configurations with SATA DDMs installed within EXP5000s attached to a DS5000 controller, and consist of the following three features:

• DS5000/EXP5000 49-96 SATA Drive Attachment Entitlement (#7390)
• DS5000/EXP5000 97-160 SATA Drive Attachment Entitlement (#7391)
• DS5000/EXP5000 161-256 SATA Drive Attachment Entitlement (#7392)

The SATA disk attachment features do not apply to SATA DDMs installed within EXP810 Storage Expansion Units attached to the DS5000 controllers.

DS5000 advanced functions
Advanced storage management, copy service options, and optional advanced disaster recovery functions are available for the DS5000, including DS Storage Manager, Storage Partitions, FlashCopy, VolumeCopy, Enhanced Remote Mirroring, and Enhanced Remote Mirror – 64-128 Mirror Upgrade.

DS Storage Manager is the storage management platform for both the DS5000 and DS4000 midrange disk series. The DS Storage Manager is designed to provide administrators with a powerful, yet easy-to-use management interface, where all tasks, including configuration, reconfiguration, expansion, maintenance, and performance tuning, are designed to be performed with no system downtime and no interruption to system I/O. The DS Storage Manager flexibility includes the ability to manage RAID levels, segment sizes, volume group sizes, volume characteristics, and cache policies.

The DS5000 is designed to enable from 8 up to 512 storage partitions, to allocate storage capacity, maximize storage space, and reduce hardware and storage management costs. Customers will need to select one of the storage partition options in their initial plant order, and may upgrade to increase the number of storage partitions using the appropriate activation feature. Upon activation of the optional storage partition features, the DS Storage Manager enables management of a single midrange disk storage system to function as multiple, logical storage systems to meet the needs of storage consolidation in heterogeneous environments.

The DS Storage Manager enables management of DS5000 advanced copy services features such as FlashCopy to instantaneously create capacity-efficient, point-in-time volume images, providing a logical volume for such uses as file restoration and backup. In contrast, VolumeCopy creates a complete physical copy — or clone — of a volume within a storage system. This unique entity can be assigned to any host and used for application testing or development, information analysis, or data mining.

The Enhanced Remote Mirroring feature consists of Global Mirror with Asynchronous Write-order Consistency (critical for mirroring multi-LUN applications), Global Copy with Asynchronous, and Metro Mirror with Synchronous (up to 128 mirror pairs with the optional DS5000 Enhanced Remote Mirror – 64-128 Mirror Upgrade).