Family Software for IBM Storwize V7000 V7.4

IBM Storwize Family Software for Storwize V7000 V7.4 provides software-defined storage capabilities across a variety of platforms.

These offerings help customers
reduce the complexities and cost of managing their storage by:
– Centralizing management of storage volumes to enable administrators to manage storage volumes from a single point
– Improving utilization of storage capacity with virtual volumes to enable businesses to tap into previously unused disk capacity
– Avoiding downtime for backups, maintenance, and upgrades
– Performing data migration without disruption to applications
– Enabling all storage devices to be organized into storage pools from which virtual volumes, whether standard, compressed, or thin-provisioned, are created with the desired characteristics
– Delivering automation of storage management with Virtual Storage Center, Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (as applicable by platform), and Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager (as applicable by platform)
– Increasing the performance efficiency of storage pools that use SSDs with Easy Tier
– Restoring data access quickly with near and remote copy capabilities across FC, FCoE, and IP networks

Storwize Family Software V7.4 improves Easy Tier capabilities to allow for up to three tiers of storage. Easy Tier users can now define their tiers making it possible to turn on Easy Tier between more than just SSDs and HDD drives. These capabilities offer more alternatives for optimizing the storage used.

As you expand storage pools, Storwize Family Software V7.4 also now provides automation to restripe data across the pools for optimal performance.

Real-time Compression has been enhanced to provide improvements in performance with the delivery of new Storwize V7000 hardware platforms, including use of the compression accelerator card feature. Updates to the cache architecture provide further improvements to overall performance.

Storwize Family Software V7.4 introduces new software licenses for Storwize V7000. This new license structure and pricing provides licensing based on the functions customers wish.

Licenses for offerings in this announcement include three years of software subscription and support. Software subscription and support entitlements are managed in Passport Advantage.

If a new release or version of an offering is made available in Passport Advantage after the announcement of the offering in the Lenovo  Group Ltd.‘s ordering systems, clients with valid software and subscription contracts may elect to take electronic delivery of the latest release or version.

Hardware requirements
Storwize Family Software for Storwize V7000 requires at least one Storwize V7000 Control Enclosure.

Planned availability date: January 13, 2015