Johannesburg, 05 May 2011
Mid-sized companies looking for sophisticated, enterprise-class storage would do well to consider IBM's powerful Storwize V7000 midrange disk system, a clustered, scalable, midrange storage solution, as well as an external virtualisation device, which can be deployed quickly due to its inherent features.
This is according to Abrie Peens, IBM business unit manager at Datacentrix, a black empowered provider of high performing and secure ICT solutions and an IBM Premier Business Partner, who believes these products have enabled today's businesses to enter a new storage solution era.
“The Storwize V7000 provides for sophisticated enterprise-class storage with built-in storage virtualisation functions that allow for thin provisioning and easy-to-use data management, designed with a graphical user interface and point-and-click system management capabilities,” he explains.
In addition, the easy to use storage for midsized businesses comes with an integrated IBM System Storage EasyTier function, which makes an up to 300% performance improvement available with automatic migration to high-performing solid state drives (SSD).
“The ability for thin provisioning allows the organisation to only purchase the disk capacity that is required at the time,” says Peens. “Furthermore, the dynamic migration capability provides continuous availability of applications while migrating critical data.”
IBM FlashCopy ensures faster and more efficient data copies for online backup, testing or data mining applications. The management GUI contains a series of pre-established configuration options, called presets, that use commonly used settings to quickly configure objects on the system. Presets are available for creating volumes and FlashCopy mappings and for setting up RAID configurations.
Adds Peens: “From an overall management perspective, IBM Systems Director will allow you to ensure flexible server and storage management capabilities, all from a single point.”
The IBM Storwize V7000 Midrange solution provides a choice of up to 120 x 3.5-inch or 240 x 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives for internal storage and uses SAS cables and connectors to attach to the optional expansion enclosures. It currently supports SSD, SAS and Nearline SAS drive types.
“When virtualising external storage arrays, the V7000 can provide up to 32 Petabytes of usable capacity, while supporting a range of external disk systems, similar to what IBM's San Volume Controller supports today.
“From a storage provisioning perspective, the V7000 has the ability to grow incrementally as storage capacity and performance needs change, with the ability of multiple storage tiering in a single system with non-disruptive migration between them,” says Peens.
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