IBM System Storage DCS3700 Controller

The IBM System Storage DCS3700 Controller delivers performance, reliability capacity and efficiency in a dense form factor, helping to address the need for streaming data and extreme capacity in a small footprint.

DCS3700 is an affordable storage platform capable of supporting up to 60 drives within a 4U enclosure. A complete configuration consists of one DCS3700 controller and two expansion units. Since each DCS3700 expansion unit supports 60 drives, a complete DCS3700 system (one controller unit and two expansions) can scale up to 180 drives.

With 6TB earline SAS disk drives, the DCS3700 can deliver up to 1.08PB of physical capacity within a 12U space. The controller and the expansion unit support intermixing of SSD, high-performance SAS, and nearline SAS drives. The DCS3700 can support a maximum of 24 SSDs.

As standard features, the DCS3700 offers 16GB of memory cache and four 12Gb SAS ports for host connectivity.

DCS3700 also offers following options:

Four or eight 12 Gb SAS ports per optional host interface card
Four or eight 16 Gb FC ports per optional host interface card (includes four or eight 16GB shortwave small form-factor pluggable transceivers)
Four or eight 10GbE iSCSI ports per optional host interface card (includes four or eight 16GB shortwave small form-factor pluggable transceivers)
Performance read cache to enable the utilization of SSDs for accelerating reads from storage, helping to increase performance for analytics and HPC environments

In order to ensure data integrity, the DCS3700 delivers flexible levels of RAID protection (0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10), and includes DDP for simplified installation, greater data protection, and more consistent performance than traditional RAID options.

Planned availability date: June 5, 2015