IBM will announce a number of enhancements to its Shark
Enterprise Storage System (ESS) Model 800 arrays designed to
increase the performance and ease of management of the storage
systems.
The ESS 800's Peer to Peer Remote Copy disaster recovery
software will now support the fibre channel interconnect standard,
which means that customers will now be able to do remote backup and
recovery with fewer switches and networking devices than the Escon
(Enterprise Systems Connection) protocol used by Shark models.
When the enhancements become available on 21 November, the ESS
800 will also include an optional 750MHz PowerPC processor called
Turbo II, which will speed up the array's performance by 30%.
IBM has also extended its support of SNIA's (Storage Networking
Industry Association) SMI (Storage Management Initiative) standard
so that more of Shark's capabilities will be available to software
written to the SMI standard.
"You can now evoke and manage flash copy, peer-to-peer remote
copy, and extended remote copy," said Jim Tuckwell, IBM's manager
of enterprise storage servers.
"Now anybody that writes to the SMI standard will have an easy
time exploiting Shark's copy services as well," he said.
The SMI standard, while still in its early stages of adoption
will, eventually, simplify storage management for both IBM and its
Shark users, said Nancy Marrone-Hurley, a senior analyst with the
Enterprise Storage Group.
"The problem right now is that every array has a different API
(application program interface)," she added.
IBM will also offer Shark customers another configuration option
called arrays across loops that "allows the data to flow over the
discs differently and faster, particularly for sequential
applications", according to Tuckwell.
Pricing for the enhanced ESS 800 will remain unchanged.
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service