IBM Information Archive Available

IBM Information Archive from IBM Corp. is designed to archive and retain records in nonerasable, nonrewritable formats. It supports businesses requirements for retaining and protecting information from premature deletion or malicious modifications. IBM Information Archive is a universal storage repository for all types of archived information that can help midsize and enterprise customers reduce storage costs and improve operational efficiencies within their data center. IBM Information Archive can help reduce the need for primary storage by enabling archiving applications to move inactive or unnecessary information off the primary storage tier to lower-cost storage tiers. When your primary storage tier has less information, applications can run faster and backup and recovery operations can be completed more quickly. In addition, IBM Information Archive can help reduce your business risk by providing a storage repository in which stored information cannot be altered or deleted until the compliance retention period has elapsed. Information Archive features the option to use the retention policies from archiving applications or to assign your own retention policies.

Key features:

• Can store content from many different applications across many standard-based interfaces via NSF, as well as the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager API.
• Provides a fully integrated solution that is simple to implement and easy to use, enabling you to quickly begin realizing the value of archiving. You can manage your archived information from a single intuitive, secure interface.
• Provides up to three information collections per Information Archive.
• Enables collections to be configured with different information protection levels (basic, intermediate, and maximum) offering flexibility.

You can store archived information on both disk and tape storage tiers, which may help reduce the overall cost of ownership for your archived information.

The base appliance frame (2231-IA3 machine type) has a drawer with a 16-drive capacity, and comes with one disk controller. For more storage, the controller can be attached to a maximum of six expansion drawers; each with the capacity for another 16-disk drives. You can configure each drawer in half-drawer increments (8 disk drives at a time, so minimum configuration will start with 8TB Raw or 3.6 TB usable). A fully populated base frame of one controller and six expansion drawers yields a capacity of 112, 1 Terabyte (TB) Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disks for 112 TB raw (72.9 TB usable).

The 2231 machine type can be supplemented with another expansion rack (2231-IS3) that has the capacity for two additional disk controllers plus a maximum of 10 expansion drawers. Each document collection requires another disk controller, so two additional controllers represents two additional document collections. Each expansion drawer can also be configured in half-drawer increments (eight disk drives at a time). A fully populated expansion rack yields a capacity of 192 disks (two controllers with 96 TB raw (63 TB usable) of total physical storage each), and provides 192 TB raw (126 TB usable) of total storage space. A primary rack, combined with an expansion rack, provides the total physical storage capacity of 304, 1 TB disks for 304 TB raw (198.9 TB usable).

Key prerequisites
IBM Information Archive (machine type 2231) requires the software entitlement for the IBM Information Archive Software (5608-IAF). The IBM Information Archive comes preinstalled on the server. Orders for the IBM Information Archive models must be configured using the eConfigurator (ECMSSD) to support accurate and complete order entry. The IBM Information Archive SW PID has to be ordered via PPA.

Planned availability date
February 5, 2010