IBM DS8800 Storage System for Business-Critical Enterprise Workloads

IBM Corp. introduces the IBM System Storage DS8800, the most advanced model in its high-end disk portfolio, with new hardware that offers faster performance and a reduction in floor space and energy requirements.

This fourth-generation DS8000 system includes 2.5-inch, 6 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) SAS drives that can enable clients to pack almost 90% more drives in the same frame footprint. Fully configured with a base frame and two expansion frames, the new DS8800 can reduce floor space requirements by 40% and energy requirements by over 35%, all while supporting more drives than a five-frame DS8700 model. The benefits, of course, are that clients can work to reclaim some of their data center floor space while they consolidate more workloads onto a single system. These small-form-factor drives offer better performance at the same rotational speeds, as well as better energy usage per drive and at a lower cost per gigabyte than the large-form-factor enterprise Fibre Channel drives available on most high-end systems today.

The new DS8800 also includes new 8 Gb/s host adapters and RAID adapters, which enable higher performance throughput by as much as 40% over prior DS8000 models. The new RAID adapters offer up to four times the throughput of the previous adapters, and, like the new host adapters, they’ll include dual core processors that will enable not only faster performance but also more effective automated tiering because the system will allow faster movement of data across the various drive tiers. Both the RAID adapters and the new host adapters also have four times the internal memory of those in the previous DS8000 models.

The result is that the new DS8800 balances the performance and energy efficiency benefits of new hardware upgrades throughout the system with the same IBM POWER architecture that has been offering system reliability and application high availability for over ten years.