IBM DS8880 Storage Family Delivers Series of Flash-Enclosure Models

IBM DS8880 storage family delivers a series of flash-enclosure models with one-year warranty

DS8880 offers six new models with support for High Performance Flash Enclosure Gen2 to deliver more processing power and flash capacity for software applications that require high performance. Clients have a choice to deploy flash with enterprise disk (DS8884 or DS8886) to handle their critical business data.

It offers a new hardware peripheral, High Performance Flash Enclosure Gen2, to address the exploitation of high-performance OLTP and analytics and helping to optimize cost, maximize performance, and provide security.

The DS8880 family offers High Performance Flash Enclosure Gen2 with the introduction of six new models that can be ordered with one, two, three, or four years of support which covers both the hardware and advanced function features:

DS8884 Model 984 with its associated DS8884 Expansion Unit Model 84E
DS8886 Model 985 with its associated DS8886 Expansion Unit Model 85E
DS8886 Model 986 with its associated DS8886 Expansion Unit Model 86E

These new model systems include a one-year standard warranty. Up to three additional years of extended warranty services are available, offering options to address business and financial needs.

These models will be the replacement of previous models 980 and 981.

High Performance Flash Enclosure Gen2
The flash enclosure and flash RAID adapter deliver improved performance and capacity compared to the previous generation of flash enclosure. The 2U flash enclosures are configured in pairs with each enclosure supporting up to 24 2.5-inch flash cards in capacities ranging from 400GB to 3.2TB. The maximum flash capacity for the DS8886 increases from 96TB to 614.4TB, delivering reduced storage costs through lesser cost per IO/s with this new flash enclosure.

The next-generation flash RAID controller delivers increased performance. Each flash adapter pair delivers up to 500,000 IO/s and up to 14GB/s and 10.5GB/s for read and write bandwidth respectively (for two High Performance Flash Enclosure pairs). High Performance Flash Enclosure Gen2 offers up to four times better performance as compared to previous enclosure.

RAID-6 default RAID type
RAID-6 will be the default RAID type for all drive types available on the High Performance Flash Enclosure Gen2 models. RAID-6 will improve the availability of arrays, especially as drive capacity increases.

Other capabilities and enhancements
DS8880 (machine types 2831, 2832, 2833, and 2834) also delivers more capabilities for new and existing customers, including:

Customer-defined digital certificates for authentication
Extents level space release support for z/OS
Configurable Hardware Management Console (HMC) firewall support
DSCLI support for z/OS environment
Ficon Information Unit (IU) pacing improvements

Key prerequisites
All announced features and functions that are supported on the DS8000 series require DS8000 LMC 8.8.20.xx.xx (bundle version 88.20.xxx.xx), or later.

Planned availability date: December 9, 2016