Overview of IBM DS4700 deep dive SAN technology

DS4700 Express Controller Architecture

The DS4700 Express Storage System integrates high-speed, industry-standard components with the robust firmware to deliver enterprise-class functionality and high performance designed to help lower cost.

DS4700 Controller Architecture

The DS4700 Express takes advantage of a 4 Gb/s bus between its core processor and I/O chips. This 64 bit, 133 MHz bus can handle vast quantities of large-block I/O (up to 990 MB/s on 512k sequential disk reads), and the speed to process large amounts of small-block I/O (44,000 IOPS on 4k random disk reads).

The I/O system core provides built-in hardware for high-speed RAID parity calculations – with a dedicated chip – And the DS4700 Express takes full advantage of its 4 Gb/s interfaces and high-speed internal buses to provide maximum throughput (MB/s) to bandwidth- intensive applications.

Each DS4700 Express controller has 4Gb/s Fibre Channel host I/O ports (eight per dual- controller Model 72, and four per Model 70) and two 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel drive I/O ports (four drive channels per storage system). With dual-controller configurations, integrated Fibre Channel loop switches connect the drive-side Fibre Channel interface chips in each controller.

Additionally, each controller has two isolated Ethernet ports – one for out-of-band management over a local or remote network, and one for authorized service personnel troubleshooting and diagnostics.

Key Points:

The DS4700 Express Storage System represents a combination of a proven design and advanced technology, designed to provide maximum advantage with the lowest risk

  • High performance, reliability, density, compliance
  • Designed to help lower direct and indirect costs (space, power, cooling, support, maintenance)
  • Designed for ease of use (hardware, software and documentation, GUI-driven management, etc.)

High performance design

  • IOPS, throughput or bandwidth
  • Application mixes requiring both IOPs and bandwidth performance

Scalability to help storage growth at a rate consistent with your needs

  • Maximum of 112 drives with up to 33.6TB of FC

DAC store is designed to provide the following benefits:

  • Creates “data intact” drive portability as drives are not bound to a given enclosure or slot
  • Individual physical drives can be relocated within a system to help improve channel utilization (performance / availability)
  • Individual RAID arrays can be migrated to another system
  • Full systems can be upgraded by simply replacing the controllers.

Designed with high availability features

  • Redundant components
  • All data paths may be configured for automatic fail-over

Heterogeneous host system support, including multi-pathing failover drivers

  • Up to 1,024 volumes for large-scale consolidation

Mix drive types in the same enclosure, may help boost tiered storage performance to an even higher level

  • Tiered storage requirements can be managed in even a modest system

Numerous data protection options, without additional requirements or load on your server resources

  • Flash Copy
  • Volume Copy
  • Synchronous and Asynchronous – Enhanced Remote Mirroring

High density storage for large or small capacity applications

  • 4.8TB of FC RAID performance storage with failover, backup (using Flash Copy) in a 3U enclosure

Maximum performance and continuous availability at a price you wouldn’t believe

  • Serving a wide range of storage consolidation and clustering applications. The IBM System Storage DS4700 is designed to be an affordable, scalable storage server for storage consolidation and clustering applications.
  • Its modular architecture—which includes Dynamic Capacity Addition, Dynamic Volume Expansion—can support on demand business environments by helping to enable storage to grow as demands increase.
  • Autonomic features such as online firmware upgrades and DS4000 Service Alert also help enhance the system’s usability.

Thanks for the Read.

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Vudagandla Srikanth

Enthusiastic Storage Administrator, Fall in love with SAN technologies. Has 8 Years of solid Information Technology experience. Motto:- Share knowledge Help Others.!!

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