SVC

IBM today announced its storage virtualization software will be packaged for small and medium sized (SMB) businesses, one of the faster growing parts of the storage marketplace.

The IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software is designed to help improve storage utilization rates, energy efficiency, administrator productivity, availability, and scalability of critical applications. It can help significantly improve the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information.

The new IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) Entry Edition helps SMBs manage that growth and improve the return on their storage investments while also helping simplify operations. SVC Entry Edition is built on more affordable hardware intended specifically to run the new SVC Entry Edition software which delivers the same rich functional capabilities as the regular SVC software. As a result, IBM Business Partners already familiar with SVC will immediately be ready to support clients using SVC Entry Edition. SVC Entry Edition is licensed by the number of disk drives virtualized rather than by terabyte to make it more accessible and affordable. With this new type of licensing, IBM Business Partners can easily package new disk storage and SVC together to deliver complete storage solutions to clients.

Since its introduction in 2003, IBM has shipped over 14,000 SVC engines running in more than 4,600 SVC systems. Complementing the announcement today of SVC Entry Edition, IBM is announcing it has accomplished a new world record SPC disk-based benchmark that demonstrates the extraordinary scalability of SVC and continues IBM’s leadership in storage virtualization with the fastest system tested in the industry. The new benchmark not only beats the previous SVC measurement but does so with IBM’s new Space-Efficient Virtual Disk thin provisioning technology enabled.(2) The new SPC-1 benchmark of SVC running with IBM DS4700 disk supports 274,997.58 SPC-1 IOPS(TM) per second.

IBM is also announcing the interoperability of SVC with the new IBM XIV Storage System, the IBM System Storage DS5000 and the IBM System z/VSE. New interoperability support for SVC also includes Microsoft Hyper-V, HDS Universal Storage Platform and HP XP20000/XP24000.

SVC Entry Edition is planned to be generally available on November 21.

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]

IBM Expands Storage Virtualization for SMBs

IBM Releases New Storage Virtualization Software