IBM System Storage DS5000 series midrange disk offering delivers new high-performance DS5100 and DS5300 storage controllers and high-capacity EXP5000 storage expansion unit.

The System Storage DS5000 series is IBM's newest midrange disk storage offering, specifically designed to provide solutions to meet the needs of midrange/departmental storage requirements, delivering high performance, advanced function, high availability, modular and scalable storage capacity, with SAN-attached 4 Gbps FC connectivity, and support for RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10, with up to 256 TB physical storage capacity.

DS5000 modular, flexible, and scalable architecture

The DS5300 (1818-53A) and DS5100 (1818-51A) controller models come in 4U rack-mountable enclosures that house redundant, dual-active intelligent RAID controllers designed to provide high availability, and allow modular addition of host port and cache memory building blocks.

The EXP5000 (1818-D1A) storage expansion unit is packaged in a 3U rack-mountable, high-capacity 16-drive bay enclosure containing dual switched 4 Gbps ESMs, dual power supplies, and redundant cooling. EXP5000s connect to DS5000 controllers via high-speed 4 Gbps FC disk expansion ports and have a physical storage capacity of up to 16 TB per enclosure, using 1000 GB SATA DDMs (disk drive modules) and up to 7.2 TB per enclosure, using 450 GB FC DDMs.

The DS5000 modular architecture helps to address the requirement for high-performance storage solutions, providing flexibility, scalability, and investment protection. A design feature of the architecture is to allow for an increase in the number of host ports over time, as well as add or change host port types as higher-speed host ports or new industry standards-based protocol host port types are introduced. At initial introduction, the DS5000 series controllers offer options of eight and sixteen host ports (four ports per controller or eight ports per controller).

Modular cache memory building blocks allow the DS5000 series to meet initial requirements, while providing the means to add more cache memory as needs dictate over time. At initial introduction, the DS5000 series offers 8 GB and 16 GB cache memory options.

Additionally, the DS5100 offers further value in flexibility, scalability, and investment protection with the optional DS5100 Performance Upgrade. The DS5100 provides excellent performance for dynamic storage consolidation solutions beginning deployment stage, with the full assurance that this model can be upgraded to full DS5300 performance level if required.

The DS5100 Performance Upgrade option is designed to provide enhanced storage server processing capability internally within the DS5100 controller. With the DS5100 Performance Upgrade option applied, the DS5100 is designed to provide the equivalent storage server processing capability as the DS5300.

The DS5000 attaches up to 16 EXP5000 Storage Expansion Units, supporting configurations up to 256 TB of FC or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disks. The DS5000 provides further investment protection with the ability to attach up to 16 DS4000tm EXP810 Expansion Units or a combination of up to 16 EXP5000s and EXP810s. This provides a rich set of upgrade paths to extend the DS4000 series installed base of EXP810s, while gaining the modular scalability and high performance built into the DS5000 family.

As part of the base machine functionality, the DS5000 controllers and EXP5000 are designed to support integration and use of up to 256 high-performance Fibre Channel disk drive modules (DDMs), and up to 48 high-capacity SATA DDMs.

Related Solutions:

Microsoft Windows Server Platforms, Redhat Linux, Suse linux, Oracle, Vmvare

References:

IBM System Storage DS5000 series

IBM DS5000 Storage

System Storage DS5000 Series