IBM Renews About All Its Storage Catalog

First to Market Innovations, Enhancements and New Products Enable Businesses to Simplify and Maximize Resources
IBM announced new first-to-market information infrastructure platform offerings and enhancements across a broad range of its disk and tape storage portfolio. Targeting clients that range from small and medium businesses (SMB) to large enterprises, the new solutions allow customers to implement a more efficient tiered storage infrastructure and achieve improved cost savings, integrated data security, and enhanced archival solutions to meet compliance requirements and have an infrastructure that delivers information on demand.

“IBM’s goal is to provide the leading technologies and solutions for storage, servers, software and services – to address the challenges and realities IT customers are facing,” said Barry Rudolph, Vice President, Storage Stack Solutions, IBM.  “The new storage offerings and enhancements we announced today will enable customers of all sizes to maintain highly resilient, high-performance, next generation network infrastructures.”

Next Generation N series for Large Enterprises
IBM announced the next generation of the N7000 series as both an appliance and gateway. The new N7700 and N7900 models will allow for improved scalability for large scale data center operations as well as storage consolidation for large open system enterprises and mid-market clients. The new systems offer massive scalability with support up to 1,176 Terabytes of raw capacity for large data center storage needs. The N7000 series enables customers to consolidate SAN and NAS storage needs to a single system that can provide support for primary, near-line, regulatory compliant data retention and archival storage all in single platform.

Further enhancements for N series include:

• For the SMB N series client, the N3300 and N3600 can now support SATA or SAS drives in the controller, giving midrange clients more flexibility and options;
• The N3300 has the increased scalability of 68TB and the N3600 to 104TB, allowing small and medium businesses to scale along with their growth;
• Additional capacity has been added to the N5300 (from 168 to 336 TB), N5600 (from 252 to 504 TB), N7600 (from 420 to 840 TB) and the N7800 (from 504 to 1008 TB);
• and SnapManager for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is now available on all N series systems, providing SMB and large enterprises a comprehensive unmatched industry solution for data management.

Next Generation Data Center Director
The IBM System Storage SAN768B establishes a platform for evolutionary growth with high performance computing and future Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technologies. It is the first director-class product to support 8 Gigabit per second (Gbps) data transfer rates over Fibre Channel (FC) links, which enables a 100 percent improvement in data transfer speed over the previous generation. The SAN768B is the first product in the industry to support true interoperability between b-type (Brocade) and m-type (McDATA) directors in an 8 and 10 Gbps global enterprise FC SAN infrastructure. For m-type and other large enterprise clients that run mainframes with FICON channels, this interoperability provides a roadmap for growth of their existing FICON fabrics. This new technology platform reduces complexity, risk and power consumption with featured scalability of up to 768 ports across two domains.

Enhanced Archive and Data Retention Systems
IBM System Storage continues to invest in the information retention space with the next generation IBM System Storage DR550 v4.5. By leveraging System Storage Archive Manager (SSAM) for policy-based information retention, the DR550 enables the transparent and automated movement of archived data between storage tiers for cost savings without compromising the security of archived data. The award winning system is now available as a single machine for enhanced for ease of customer setup and use, leveraging IBM Director as the unified management system. Clients who are looking to protect business critical information for long term security as well as manage information growth and compliance can choose from two models of the DR550 v4.5: DR1 and DR2. The DR1 is a 25U tall rack, pre-integrated and ideal for mid-market clients. The DR2 is built for large enterprises, packaged in a bigger 36U tall rack and offering single or dual-node configuration options for higher availability and scalability.
 
Disk Systems Maximized for SMB Telco
IBM announced the new NEBS compliant IBM System Storage DS3300 DC power model 32T which is designed with no single point of failure for high availability and hot swappable redundant components for high reliability in the SMB telecommunications industry. The new features enable telecommunications service providers to deliver everything from basic voice telephony to Internet Protocol television (IPTV), video on demand (VoD), IP multimedia subsystems (IMS) and security.
The DS3300 DC easily integrates into existing IP networks with no distance limitations through iSCSI connectivity, including a dual iSCSI controller enclosure with 12 disk drive bays. The DS3300 has dual redundant DC power supplies and can go virtually anywhere beyond the corporate data center including remote locations. To meet the growing demand for storage capacity and scalability, three EXP3000 units are also available for support of up to 48 SAS and or SATA disks.

New Drives for Linear Tape-Open
IBM introduced the latest generation of the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) tape drive in a half height factor for the IBM System Storage TS3100 and TS3200 Tape Library Express Models, offering savings for cost and space conscious businesses.
The drives are optimal for handling backup, saving, restoring and archiving data in the SMB environments, and provide higher levels of security against physical cartridge loss and theft. Both are designed to offer high capacity, enhanced performance and technology for the midrange open system environment.

IBM is the first company in the storage industry to offer Ultrium 4 Half-High SAS half-high tape drives in entry automation, enhancing tape performance over the previous generation. SMB customers can encrypt and manage data with the industry leading IBM Encryption Key Manager, without the need for additional appliances.

Pricing and Availability
The new N7700 and the N7900 will be generally available (GA) worldwide on April 18, 2008. The N7700 is available with a starting configuration price of $125,000. The new N7900 has a starting configuration price of $190,000.
The enhanced DR550 DR1 will be generally available on February 29, 2008 with a starting configuration price of $26,000. The DR550 DR2 will be generally available on February 29, 2008 with a starting configuration price of $73,000.
The IBM System Storage DS3300 DC will be generally available on February 29, 2008 with a starting configuration price of $9,495.
The IBM System Storage TS3100 Tape Library Express Model and the IBM System Storage TS3200 Tape Library Express Model will be generally available on March 14, 2008 with a starting configuration price of $8,300.
The IBM System Storage SAN768B will be generally available on February 22, 2008 with an entry configuration price of $390,000
 

IBM Corp.