As part of the company’s “Project Big Green” offerings, IBM today announced new storage virtualization software that helps clients manage and consolidate volumes of business data, providing clients with a storage solution designed to help improve utilization rates, energy efficiency, availability, and scalability of critical applications.
According to the press release, the capabilities of the new IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) 4.3 software can help significantly improve the
flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information across the enterprise. Storage virtualization technology can reduce requirements for additional physical storage hardware systems, which can ultimately reduce overall energy usage in the data center.
Virtualization is confirmed as one of the five pillars of IBM’s Project Big Green offerings, and a key component of IBM’s new enterprise data center model, which is based on best practices for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.
Since its introduction to the market in 2003, IBM has shipped over 12,000 SVC engines running in more than 4,000 SVC systems.
The new IBM SAN Volume Controller 4.3 functions will be available for download on June 27, at no additional charge, and existing SVC customers will be able to take advantage of these improvements when they upgrade to SVC 4.3.
[Source: CNN Money]
The IBM SVC 4.3 software announced today includes the following enhancements:
- Space-Efficient Virtual Disks – uses disk space only when data is written instead of reserving disk space for the entire capacity of a virtual disk;
- Space-Efficient FlashCopy – uses disk space only for changes between source and target data and not for the entire capacity of a virtual disk copy;
- Virtual Disk Mirroring – helps improve availability for critical applications by storing two copies of a virtual disk on different disk systems;
- Improved Interoperability – includes support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Mac OS X Server, as well as Pillar Axiom disk systems.
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