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.
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.
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