IBM DCS3860 RAID Controller

IBM System Storage DCS3860 is the next generation in controller technology designed to meet the need for scalable bandwidth requirements to remain productive for high-performance streaming applications, such as HPC, rich media, weather forecasting, seismic processing, or life sciences research.

The DCS3860 is a storage platform capable of supporting up to 60 drives within a 4U enclosure. 

A complete DCS3860 system configuration consists of one DCS3860 controller and five EXP3800 expansion units. Since each expansion unit supports 60 drives, a complete DCS3860 system can scale up to 360 drives. With 4TB high-capacity nearline SAS disk drives, the DCS3860 can deliver up to 1.44PB 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 24 SSDs.

Standard memory cache on the DCS3860 is 24GB, with 12GB per controller. The storage system provides eight 6Gb SAS host interfaces (four per controller), and provides performance read cache to enable the utilization of SSDs for accelerating reads from the storage, helping to increase performance for analytics and HPC environments.

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

Key prerequisites: The DCS3860 is supported for attachment to select IBM BladeCenters and other Intel and AMD processor-based servers.

Planned availability date: November 21, 2014

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IBM System Storage DCS3860 RAID
4U, 60 bays for SAS drives, up to 24 SSDs, expandable to 1.44PB in 24U