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IBM Launches New Product Line
An anonymous reader notes that "IBM has launched its new product line of storage devices: the DS6000 and the DS8000. The results are quite impressive, with the DS6000 being rack mountable, 3U, and ONLY 125 pound storage device that will hold up to 67.2 TB! The DS8000 is equally impressive, with 6x performance of ESS 800 (Shark), making it the most powerful storage system to date. "
More articles, for the more article inclined.
It's 67.2 TB if you have 14 racks (224 disks)...a single rack only allows 300Gb x 16drives = 4.8 TB...quite still a lot though.
The DS6000 supports up to to 67.2TB, but not in one enclosure. The DS6000 only fits 16 disks per enclosure, and with 400GB disks that is 6.4TB. 400GB disks seem to only be available as SATA and PATA, the largest SCSI disks I could find are 300GB. That means 4.8TB per enclosure. 16 DS6000's per 48U rack, that's 76.8TB. Remove every 8th disk for RAID-5, that's 67.2TB.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It'll grow by the modular 3U unit.
The single 3U unit won't hold 67.2Tb, that's a bunch of them linked together.
You misread the spec, I believe. There's 16 drive bays, and the biggest single drive I'm aware of at the moment is 400 gig.
What they said was: "Using modular, 3U, 16 disk drive, rack-mountable enclosures, the DS6000 series can grow along with your storage needs up to 67.2TB physical storage".
According to the datasheet, they offer drives up to 300gig in each bay, which works out to around 4.8 Tb per enclosure.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Product pricing and availability
IBM's new storage offerings with enterprise class functions reset the bar with minimum configurations starting at half a terabyte and list prices starting as low as $97,000. The DS6000 series and the DS8000 series come standard with a four-year warranty on hardware and software, which is unique in the industry.
What are they smoking? 9.7 k a terrabyte, maybe. 97k. Even EMC is not that high any more.
Hitachi took over IBM's Desktop hard drive business.
And I believe IBM actually had 2 lines that had issues (The 75 GXP and, to a lesser extent, the 60 GXP).
I had 2 30 GB 75 GXP drives, I think I ended up going through 3 RMAs. Eventually, IBM replaced one with a 60 GB 120GXP (I believe it was the 120 GXP) with an 8mb cache (original drives only had 2mb cache). While the RMAs were a hassle, IBM did a pretty good job of taking care of me.
We've been getting disk arrays like the DS6000 for months now... for example:
RocketSTOR R2221
or
Silicon Mechanics SM-316RX
Good: - Robust technology - Modular - IBM support Bad: - Expensive - Only 2 GB of cache (mirrored) - Slow, check out http://www.storageperformance.org/results
LTO2 tapes are 200GBytes each... Remember that these boxes can flashcopy (instantly do a complete copy of your data, kinda like LVM snapshot support but actually working and a hell of a lot more powerful, oh, and done in hardware), so you don't need to stop your database whilst you're waiting to write it to tape.
If you actually read the link, you'd see there is at least as much redundancy designed into the system than in most NAS systems, and it has been very reliable to date. You are familiar with the idea of RAID, aren't you -- Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks? This is the same approach as in the IBM hardware, but at a much higher level.
For example they maintain integrity checks of every block, to catch silent corruption. This is not done by many competing systems -- it is a major selling point of Sun ZFS that they do.
The primary reason why Google don't use this for their financial systems is likely that it is custom designed for their search applications, not for whatever financial systems they use. Secondarily the volume is so small that an off-the-shelf system probably works fine.
Do I expect everyone to build their own system? No, but for some users it works well.
(Why are people happy to use the thought "fuck", but not the letters? Bizarre. And what is this loose data you speak of?)
Just a quick one - Partitions != LUNs.
:) A standard FAStT600 supports 1 storage partition, a FAStT600 Turbo will support up to 4 and a FAStT900 will support up to 8 iirc.
A LUN (logical unit number) is specific to the host and is effectively the physical disk number. The number of LUNs supported is very much dependant on the OS (Windows/Solaris support 256 and Linux supports 128 due to RDAC limitations currently).
Storage partitioning is configured at the storage device level and is a logical grouping of logical drives, host groups and hosts to control access and improve performance. The number of partitions supported depends on how much you want to pay IBM
The IBM FAStT range have just been renamed to DS4x00 (the 600 is the DS4300, 700 is the DS4400 and 900 is the DS4500). Saying that, they are all rebadged LSI Logic (Engenio) devices anyway. The DS6000 and DS8000 products are basically a refresh/replacement of the old ESS product set.
You mention the ability to do server-free backups - this can also be done on the FAStT (DS4x00) products if you pay the extra for the Premium Features such as Flashcopy, Logical Drive Copy and Remote Mirroring which are available on the 600 Turbo, 700 and 900 models.
Alex (currently actually on an IBM DS4x00 training course!)
Google is a completely different animal.
Google itself is ultra reliable so long as most everything is working kinda sorta well. Something breaks and Google just researches the web, which it was going to do anyway. Google can function perfectly well with lots of its components broken. Almost nobody else can.
The FastT subsystem is remarketed LSI aka Symbios aka NCR. (Yes, as in the old SCSI card maker NCR.) FastT has a really cheap heritage, and only supports active/passive failover like other low end products like the EMC Clariion line.
For a better feel for the DS line, you have to look at the feature set of the ESS (shark) line.
The sharks have two pSeries boxes in them that act as an intermediary between the FC (fabric) host-adapters on the front end, and the IBM SSA disk loops and trays on the back end. These servers also handle caching and RAID functions for the SSA disks.
(The shark line was backended on SSA disk. But they did go to SCSI disks with an SSA-shim around the time they sold their disk business to Hitachi.)
The DS8000 appears to be based on FC-AL on the back end, much like the EMC DMX line.
In addition to the software based features of the ESS, some models in the DS8000 lineup will have enough spare CPU to host an LPAR. Presumably this LPAR will be used to run the SVC virtualization software. (And who knows what else? Maybe TSM some day?)
If the pricing is good, it could be a compelling product to VAR.