Continuing its commitment to developing and delivering industry-leading storage technology, IBM is introducing the IBM® Storwize® V7000 system, an innovative new storage offering that delivers essential storage efficiency technologies, exceptional ease of use and performance—all integrated into a compact, modular design that’s offered at a competitive, midrange price.

The IBM Storwize V7000 system incorporates some of IBM’s top technology, typically found only in enterprise-class storage systems, raising the standard for storage efficiency in midrange disk systems. This cutting-edge storage system extends the comprehensive storage portfolio from IBM and can help change the way organisations address the ongoing information explosion.

 

Overview

Highlights

  • Delivers sophisticated enterprise-class storage function for businesses of all sizes
  • Supports your growing business requirements while controlling costs
  • Provides up to 200 percent performance improvement with automatic migration to high-performing SSDs1
  • Consolidates block and file storage in a single system for simplicity and greater efficiency
  • Enables near-continuous availability of applications through dynamic migration
  • Supports faster and more efficient data copies for online backup, testing or data mining
  • Offers flexible server and storage management with easy to use GUI for block and file storage management
  • Easy-to-use data management designed with a graphical user interface and point-and-click system management capabilities
  • Metro Mirror and Global Mirror for replicating data synchronously or asynchronously between systems for backup efficiency
  • SSD for applications that demand high speed and quick access to data
  • RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10

In storage management today, breaking the cycle of increased complexity and explosive data growth can be a big challenge. The old ways of buying and managing storage have become less effective. Due to resource constraints—both physical storage resources and human resources—IT organizations must act quickly to optimize and simplify their infrastructure. Unchecked complexity and growth will only become bigger problems over time.

Small and midsize organizations may also suffer from a range of challenges including disruptive migrations, difficulty deploying tiered storage, inability to share storage among servers, reduced productivity/increased cost caused by isolated server and storage management tools, and inability to use virtualized storage as a tool for optimizing expenditures, resources and capabilities.

To stand up to these challenges and allow businesses to respond to a rapidly changing marketplace, IBM® Storwize® V7000 Unified is a virtualized storage system to complement virtualized server environments that provides unmatched performance, availability, advanced functions and highly scalable capacity never seen before in midrange disk systems. Storwize V7000 Unified is a powerful midrange disk system that has been designed to be easy to use and enable rapid deployment without additional resources. Storwize V7000 Unified consolidates block and file workloads into a single storage system for simplicity of management and reduced cost. Storwize V7000 systems are also available for block-only workloads. Storwize V7000 Unified is virtual storage that offers greater efficiency and flexibility through built-in solid state drive (SSD) optimization and thin provisioning technologies. Storwize V7000 Unified advanced functions also enable non-disruptive migration of data from existing storage, simplifying implementation and minimizing disruption to users. Storwize V7000 Unified also enables you to virtualize and reuse existing disk systems, supporting a greater potential return on investment (ROI).

Product features

  • Automatic migration of frequently accessed data to high performing solid state drives SSDs
  • Provisioning support for business applications that need to grow dynamically, but only consume the storage space they are actually using
  • Migration capabilities that provide efficiency and business value in a nondisruptive migration
  • Unified storage capability for greater simplicity and efficiency
  • Policy-based file management
  • Support for near instant data copies for backup or application testing
  • Integrated instant copy capabilities for critical business needs
  • Integrated tools and capabilities for server and storage management
  • In block-only configurations, clustered systems support growing business needs while controlling costs

Hardware summary

  • 2U rack-mountable chasses
  • Twenty-four 2.5-inch drive bays (model x24) or twelve 3.5-inch drive bays (model x12)
  • Up to 36 TB of physical storage per enclosure using 3 TB near-line SAS disk drive modules, or up to 21.6 TB physical storage per enclosure using 900 GB SAS disk drive modules
  • SAS disk drives, near-line SAS disk drives and SSDs
  • Redundant dual-active intelligent controllers
  • 16 GB cache memory per control enclosure (8 GB per internal controller) as a base feature
  • For each control enclosure: Eight 8 Gbps Fibre Channel host ports (four 8 Gbps FC ports per RAID controller), four 1 Gbps and optionally four 10 Gbps iSCSI host ports (two 1 Gbps and optionally two 10 Gbps iSCSI host ports per RAID controller)
  • File module provides attachment to 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps network-attached storage (NAS) environments
  • Control enclosure supports attachment of up to nine expansion enclosures with configurations up to 360 TB physical storage capacities (720 TB in clustered systems)
  • Dual power supplies and cooling components
Specification

 

Host interface SAN-attached 8 Gbps Fiber Channel (FC), 1 Gbps iSCSI and optional 10 Gbps iSCSI
NAS-attached 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet
User interface Graphical user interface (GUI)
Supported drives 3.5-inch disk drives:
  • 2 TB, 3 TB 3.5 in. 7.2k Near-Line SAS disk
2.5-inch disk drives:
  • 146 GB, 300 GB 2.5 inch 15k SAS disk
  • 300 GB, 450 GB, 600 GB, 900 GB 2.5 inch. 10k SAS disk
  • 200 GB, 300 GB, 400 GB 2.5 inch E-MLC (enterprise-grade multilevel cell) solid state drive (SSD)
  • 1 TB 2.5-inch 7.2k Near-Line SAS disk
RAID levels RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10
Maximum drives supported 240 per control enclosure; 480 per clustered system
Fans and power supplies Fully redundant, hot swappable
Rack support Standard 19 inch
Management software Storwize V7000 Unified software
Cache per controller/control enclosure/clustered system 8 GB/16 GB/32 GB
Advanced features included with each system System Storage Easy Tier, FlashCopy, thin provisioning
Additional available advanced features Remote mirroring, external virtualization unified storage, IBM® FlashCopy Manager, IBM Tivoli® Storage Productivity Center Select, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack®, IBM Systems Director, IBM Active Cloud Engine™
Warranty Hardware:
  • 3 year limited warranty
  • Customer replaceable units
  • On-site service
  • Next Business Day 9×5
  • Service upgrades available
Software:
  • Software Maintenance Agreement available
Replication services FlashCopy, FlashCopy Manager, Metro Mirror (Synchronous), Global Mirror (Asynchronous), local and asynchronous remote file-based replication
Dimensions Control and expansion enclosures
  • Width: 483 mm (19.0 in.)
  • Depth: 630 mm (24.8 in.)
  • Height: 87.9 mm (3.46 in.)
File Modules
  • Width: 482 mm (19.0 in.)
  • Depth: 729 mm (28.7 in.)
  • Height: 85.2 mm (3.45 in.)
Weight 12-bay enclosures:
  • Drive-ready (without drive modules installed): 17.7 kg (37.6 lb)
  • Fully configured (12 drive modules installed): 27.2 kg (59.8 lb)
24-bay enclosures:
  • Drive-ready (without drive modules installed): 17.7 kg (37.6 lb)
  • Fully configured (24 drive modules installed): 25.2 kg (55.4 lb)
File Modules: 29.6 kg (65 lb)
Supported systems For a list of currently supported servers, operating systems, host bus adapters, clustering applications and SAN switches and directors, refer to the System Storage Interoperation Centre.
ISV solutions For a list of high quality solutions with our partner Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), including access to solution briefs and white papers, refer to the ISV Solutions Resource Library.