IBM Scale Out NAS (SONAS) 1.1.1

Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) from IBM Corp. is a scale-out NAS offering designed to manage vast repositories of information in enterprise environments requiring very large capacities, high levels of performance, and high availability. The system supports multiple petabytes of storage, up to a billion files in a single file system and up to 256 file systems per system. Data access to the system from client computers is provided using industry standard network file protocols NFS v2/v3, CIFS, HTTP, and FTP (including z/OS NFS client support).

SONAS 1.1.1 launches support for the following new functions, included with the SONAS software package:

• Enhanced TSM support with Integrated Lifecycle Management and Hierarchical Storage Management
• New asynchronous replication capabilities
• Addition of HTTP protocol support
• Addition of Network Information Service (NIS) support: NIS is mainly used in UNIX base environment for user and services management like active directory

Note: NIS authentication is not supported.

In addition, the following hardware features will be supported:

• 600 GB SAS Drives
• 128 GB memory option for the SONAS Interface Nodes
• USB modem for the SONAS Management Nodes

The IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) is a highly scalable system designed to provide a clustered NAS system with a single name space for CIFS, NFS, HTTP, and FTP services. The system consists of two to thirty Interface Nodes (2851-SI1), one to thirty storage pods consisting of the Storage Node (2851-SS1), Storage Controller (2851-DR1), and attached disks, and one Management Node (2851-SM1). The maximum configuration provides up to 14.4 PB of storage capacity in a single cluster, highly-redundant system.
The storage used in the SONAS system can be high-performance 15K RPM SAS HDDs or high-capacity 7.2K RPM SATA HDDs, allowing users to configure according to their needs.

There are three rack configurations (2851-RXA, -RXB, and -RXC) that can be populated with the nodes, switches and storage units needed to configure according to the needs of the user environment.

Key prerequisites: Orders for the IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) models must be configured using the eConfigurator (ECMSSD) to support accurate and complete order entry.

Planned availability date: August 13, 2010