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The success of a business often depends on its ability to manage information efficiently. Yet many businesses are finding that without an on demand environment, the rapid growth of information is outpacing their ability to collect, store and maintain it. To help facilitate effective and efficient information management, IBM introduced the IBM System Storage™ DS Family of disk storage systems, including:
_ DS8000™ series—Enterprise-class disk systems to help address the challenges of the most demanding IT environments by setting new standards in functionality and performance
_ DS6000™ series—Affordable enterprise-class storage for open systems and mainframes in a small, modular package
_ DS4000™ series—Attractively priced storage systems for heterogeneous UNIX® and Windows® environments
_ DS3000™ series—Easy and affordable systems for the entry-level storage environments
The IBM System Storage DS Family is designed to help your company simplify its storage infrastructure, support business continuity and improve information lifecycle management. It combines cost-effective scalability, a more consistent method to store and access data across the enterprise, streamlined data management tools and advanced virtualization technologies. The potential benefits are clear: Increased efficiency and employee productivity, enhanced data protection, and improved return on investment.
With a wide range of product offerings based on open standards and sharing a common set of tools, interfaces and innovative features in a common operating environment, the IBM System Storage DS Family gives you the freedom to choose the right combination of storage systems for your current needs, and the flexibility for your infrastructure to evolve with your changing needs.
The IBM System Storage DS Family offers the opportunity to simplify your IT infrastructure through consolidation, virtualization and streamlined storage management.
Consolidation begins with interoperability. The IBM System Storage DS Family supports a broad array of IBM and non-IBM server platforms, including IBM z/OS®, z/VM®, OS/400®, i5/OS® and AIX® operating systems, as well as Linux®, HP-UX, Sun SOLARIS, Novell NetWare, UNIX and Microsoft® Windows environments. The DS Family supports multiple server platforms, including IBM System z™, System i™, System p™, or System x™ servers, and third-party servers. Consequently, you can have the freedom to choose your preferred vendors and run the applications you require to help address your business needs while extending your previous IT investments.
Whether your goal is to minimize the complexity of department workgroups or consolidate the entire IT infrastructure, the IBM System Storage DS Family offers options to reduce the number of storage systems you need to use. At the same time, the flexibility of IBM System Storage DS Family systems to work with an array of other IBM and non-IBM products can help you to construct a simple, cost-effective and compact storage infrastructure.
Storage asset consolidation can be greatly assisted by virtualization. Virtualization software provides capabilities to logically combine separate physical storage systems into a single, virtual storage pool. Pooling storage resources helps simplify storage management, reduce system complexity and lower IT costs. Virtualization offers dramatic opportunities to reduce costs by increasing not only the efficiency of systems but also their availability and flexibility. Administrators that are utilizing virtualized systems can migrate data between physical storage arrays without disrupting access to the data. This allows them to choose the most cost-efficient storage solution that meets their needs.
Utilizing the innovative logical partitioning technology built into IBM POWER5+™ processors, the DS8300 introduces a new level of virtualization with IBM Virtualization Engine™ technology. While the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller provides disk-level virtualization, the DS8300 systems bring the flexibility of IBM server systems, with their ability to isolate logical partitions from each other, to the storage space.
With this virtualization capability, you can maintain two completely separate virtual storage subsystems running the same or different storage environments. The virtual subsystems can be used for distinct production, test or other unique storage environments, all operating within a single physical enclosure. This virtualization capability can help to reduce costs and allow further consolidation of the storage environment. In addition, it leverages the scalability of the DS8300 to deliver performance to each storage system logical partition (LPAR).
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