IBM has upgraded its tape and disk systems and its storage management software to help customers more efficiently handle data from creation to deletion.
Such offerings are commonly referred to as making up an information life-cycle management (ILM) system, in which data can be stored on systems that make the most sense from a speed and price standpoint, depending on the nature of the data.
IBM's ILM strategy while similar to those from EMC and HP, is only part of the company's on-demand computing vision, in which resources can be dynamically shifted and allocated according to need.
The company is incorporating the latest Linear Tape Open 3 technology into its tape drives, libraries and autoloaders, enabling media to be read by any LTO-compatible drive from HI?IBM or Quantum. IBM says its Ultrium LTO 3-enabled libraries, which run at up to 8OM byte/sec, have double the performance and capacity of earlier LTO 2 offerings. IBM also has introduced a dual-robotics feature for its TotalStorage 3584 tape library that doubles the tape mount performance.
On the disk front, IBM announced that its DS4000 subsystem now uses 146G-byte, 15,000-rpm and 300G-byte, 10,000-rpm Fibre Channel disk drives for total capacity of more than 67T bytes in a midrange storage system. This lets customers choose faster drives for their business-critical data and slower, higher-capacity drives for lessimportant or archival data.To enable more control of storage environments, IBM announced Version 2.1 of its TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller, which includes a migration capability that lets data be moved between disk arrays from different vendors.
Chuck Long, SAN administrator for Safelite Autoglass in Columbus, Ohio, has used the software to migrate data from one IBM storage array to another.
"We migrated 2T bytes in an hour and a half," Long says. "Nobody [on the network] had any idea it was being done. It would've taken late into the night before."
Long, who has virtualized about two-thirds of his storage environment, has several IBM Enterprise Storage Servers as well as DS4300 and DS4400 midrange arrays.
SAN Volume Controller 2.1 also can pool data on Sun StorEdge 9910,9960,9970 and 9980 arrays. It is priced on a per-terabyte basis. Users pay for only the number of terabytes they virtualize.
SAN Volume Controller supports a form of symmetrical virtualization in which all data from host computers or storage systems passes through it, where it can control the actions, such as Flashcopy or Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy that are taken on the data.
The software, which is implemented on a clustered pair of xSeries 335 servers running Linux or on Cisco's MDS9000 Fibre Channel director-level switches, works with Windows, AlX, Red Hat Linux, Solaris and HP-UX hosts. It works with storage arrays from IBM, Hitachi Data Systems, EMC, HP and Sun.
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