IBM Launches Ultra-Powerful Storage Server

IBM (www.ibm.com) today extended its midrange storage family with the introduction of a new four gigabit per second storage system. The new IBM® TotalStorage® DS4800 is priced similarly to the EMC CX700 and HP EVA5000 yet offers up to twice the maximum performance, making it one of the fastest midrange disk systems in the market today.

In a performance benchmark and testing developed by The Storage Performance Council, the DS4800 set a new standard for midrange storage server performance delivering a maximum of more than 42,000 SPC-1 IOPS.

The DS4800 achieved these breakthrough performance metrics with its high-performance architecture incorporating four gigabit per second technology.

"IBM's new DS4800 is an excellent choice for clients with high-performance computing needs that store and utilize vast amounts of data for high-bandwidth programs and complex application processing, such as those in the energy, entertainment and scientific research segments," said

Rich Lechner, vice president of storage, IBM.
"With the proven high performance of the DS4800, we believe we are introducing a compelling new alternative for our clients that can't be matched by EMC or HP products in the same class."

In addition to outstanding performance, the IBM DS4800 offers scalability designed to support up to 67 terabytes of data. It also designed to provide data failover software, availability and integrity features, all managed through an easy to use graphical user interface (GUI).

The DS4800 is designed to operate in a heterogeneous operating system environment which includes AIX, HPUX, Solaris, Windows®, and various Intel® and POWER(TM)-based versions of Linux(TM). IBM's TotalStorage Productivity Center is designed to provide advanced management capabilities including discovery, asset and capacity reporting, monitoring, and configuration/provisioning for the DS4800.

The new DS4800 will take the leading enterprise-class spot among IBM's full line of DS4000 storage servers, and will support all of IBM's storage software offerings, including the latest generation of IBM's TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) also announced today.

This seventh generation of IBM's storage virtualization technology continues to expand scalability and interoperability to help enable SVC to manage larger and more diverse environments. SAN Volume Controller is now designed to support up to 256 hosts to access the storage managed with SVC.

With the help of Cisco, SAN Volume Controller now supports significant new functions available with the Cisco MDS9000 family of switches/directors, designed to enable heterogeneous SAN fabrics to work together and more efficiently.

The desire by businesses to access, manage and deliver information more efficiently is driving rapid change in the IT marketplace. Traditional low-tech, hardware-only approaches by proprietary vendors are meeting with resistance as companies grappling with new government mandates and business demands strive to capture and integrate information in a more seamless, real-time fashion across the enterprise.