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4 DS8000 Series: Concepts and Architecture
1.1 The DS8000, a member of the TotalStorage DS family
IBM has a wide range of product offerings that are based on open standards and that share a
common set of tools, interfaces, and innovative features. The IBM TotalStorage DS family
and its new member, the DS8000, gives you the freedom to choose the right combination of
solutions for your current needs and the flexibility to help your infrastructure evolve as your
needs change. The TotalStorage DS family is designed to offer high availability, multiplatform
support, and simplified management tools, all to help you cost effectively adjust to an on
demand world.
1.1.1 Infrastructure Simplification
The DS8000 series is designed to break through to a new dimension of on demand storage,
offering an extraordinary opportunity to consolidate existing heterogeneous storage
environments, helping lower costs, improve management efficiency, and free valuable floor
space. Incorporating IBM’s first implementation of storage system Logical Partitions (LPARs)
means that two independent workloads can be run on completely independent and separate
virtual DS8000 storage systems, with independent operating environments, all within a single
physical DS8000. This unique feature of the DS8000 series, which will be available in the
DS8300 Model 9A2, helps deliver opportunities for new levels of efficiency and cost
effectiveness.
1.1.2 Business Continuity
The DS8000 series is designed for the most demanding, mission-critical environments
requiring extremely high availability, performance, and scalability. The DS8000 series is
designed to avoid single points of failure and provide outstanding availability. With the
additional advantages of IBM FlashCopy, data availability can be enhanced even further; for
instance, production workloads can continue execution concurrent with data backups. Metro
Mirror and Global Mirror business continuity solutions are designed to provide the advanced
functionality and flexibility needed to tailor a business continuity environment for almost any
recovery point or recovery time objective. The addition of IBM solution integration packages
spanning a variety of heterogeneous operating environments offers even more cost-effective
ways to implement business continuity solutions.
1.1.3 Information Lifecycle Management
The DS8000 is designed as the solution for data when it is at its most on demand, highest
priority phase of the data life cycle. One of the advantages IBM offers is the complete set of
disk, tape, and software solutions designed to allow customers to create storage
environments that support optimal life cycle management and cost requirements.
1.2 Overview of the DS8000 series
The IBM TotalStorage DS8000 is a new high-performance, high-capacity series of disk
storage systems. An example is shown in Figure 1-1 on page 5. It offers balanced
performance that is up to 6 times higher than the previous IBM TotalStorage Enterprise
Storage Server (ESS) Model 800. The capacity scales linearly from 1.1 TB up to 192 TB.
With the implementation of the POWER5 Server Technology in the DS8000 it is possible to
create storage system logical partitions (LPARs) that can be used for completely separate
production, test, or other unique storage environments.