IBM introduces System Storage DS8700

System Storage DS8700 Offers up to 150% Performance Improvement

IBM today announced the introduction of new and enhanced storage systems to address the information infrastructure needs of its clients, including availability of the newest model of its high-end storage array for enterprise clients.

IBM is introducing the System Storage DS8700, the most advanced model in the DS8000 lineup, offering much higher performance, reliability and resiliency, as well as greater energy efficiency.  The DS8700 includes new dual IBM POWER6-based controllers, a new internal fabric interconnect, and upgraded device adapters that deliver a performance improvement of up to over 150%, compared to the most powerful previous model.  This enhances the DS8700's ability to support the most demanding business applications and business analytics requirements.

The System Storage DS8700 enables clients to non-disruptively upgrade from base models to the most advanced models, allowing organizations to grow their systems as requirements increase without purchasing brand new systems. In addition to this flexible and scalable design, the DS8700 also allows clients to benefit from the investments they made in prior generations. For instance, the DS8700 offers full interoperability with the prior model's hard drives, drive enclosures, tools, scripts, and copy services. The new System Storage DS8700 is also more energy efficient, offering more than a 50 percent increase in IOPS/Watt than the previous DS8300 models.

The introduction of System Storage DS8700 represents the latest addition to DS8000 line of high-end disk systems. Earlier this year, IBM was the first (and still only) vendor to introduce self-encrypting drives on it enterprise-class storage array.

Also this year, IBM introduced Solid State Drives (SSDs) on the DS8000, and today unveiled plans to deliver SSD technology that exploits SSDs on the System Storage DS8700 through use of smart data placement, an initiative IBM unveiled in May.  To take advantage of SSDs in a tiered DS8700 system, IBM will enhance the DS8700’s ability to identify hot data and automatically migrate that data to and from solid-state and fibre channel drives. This automated data relocation can help optimize data placement across tiers of drives with different price and performance attributes, helping clients more effectively balance system price and performance.  As one example, by moving only ten percent of the hottest data from fibre channel drives to solid state drives, it’s expected that clients can see approximately a 300 percent performance gain for high transaction workloads.

IBM recently announced that it has maintained leadership position in the India External Disk Storage market in terms of Factory Revenue in Q2 of CY2009 with a 35.2% market share and a 69.3% revenue growth, registering a substantial gain of 16.2 points year-on-year (Q2 CY2009 over Q2CY2008), as per IDC's Asia/Pacific Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, Q2 CY2009, September 2009.

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