Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Oh my, it is Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements!

This week, IBM announced its latest storage arrays in its IBM System Storage DS8000 series: the DS8880 models. Similar to the "Business Class" vs. "Enterprise Class" distinctions of the DS8870, IBM announced two new models, the DS8884 and the DS8886.

All of the new DS8880 models are based on the latest IBM POWER8 processors, and are noticeably thinner! These are now standard 19-inch wide, fitting nicely into standard IBM racks alongside most other standard 19-inch rack equipment.

The DC-UPS that used to be on the side are now at the bottom of each frame, taking up 8U of space. The High Performance Flash Enclosures (HPFE) that formerly were stored vertically above the DC-UPS will be stored horizontally with the rest of the HDD and SSD drives.

DS8884 model

The DS8884 will have 6-core controllers, up to 256 GB Cache, 64 ports that can negotiate between 16Gbps and 8Gbps, up to 240 drives in a single-rack configuration or 768 drives in a three-frame configuration, and up to 120 flash cards in HPFEs. The performance of this one is equal or better to existing DS8870 systems.

DS8886 model

The DS8886 will have 8-core, 16-core and 24-core controllers, offering up to three times the performance as the previous DS8870 models, with up to 2 TB of Cache, 128 ports, up to 1,536 drives across five frames, and up to 240 flash cards in HPFEs.

Field model conversion from DS8870 to DS8886 is available for existing clients with DS8870 Enterprise Configurations. This will let clients move their existing HDD, SSD, HPFE and Host Adapters over to the new DS8880 models.

In previous DS8000 models, clients would have one Hardware Management Console (HMC) inside the array, and an optional second HMC workstation somewhere else for high availability. While the second one was optional, it was always considered best practice to have it for redundancy sake. In the new DS8880 models, you can have both HMC in the array, and the Keyboard/Video/Monitor (KVM) can select between the two.

The new I/O enclosure pairs are four times faster, supporting six Device Adapters and two HPFE connections over PCIe Gen 3 network, the fastest available in the industry.

Lastly, IBM simplified the licensing of software features into three bundles, based on TB total capacity of Fixed Block (FB) LUNs and Count-Key-Data (CKD) volumes:

• Base function License: Logical Configuration support for FB, Operating Environment License, Thin Provisioning, Easy Tier® automated sub-volume tiering, and I/O Priority Manager.
   
• Copy Services License: FlashCopy®, Metro Mirror, Global Mirror, Metro/Global Mirror, z/Global Mirror (XRC), z/Global Mirror Resync, and Multi-Target PPRC.
   
• z-Synergy Service License: Parallel Access Volumes (PAV), HyperPAV, FICON® attachment, High performance FICON (zHPF), and IBM z/OS® Distributed Data Backup (zDDB).

IBM also provided a "Product preview", announcing plans for a third member of the DS8880 family in 2016 that will be flash-optimized to provide an all-flash, higher performance storage system model.

To learn more, read the [IBM Press Release] and [Function authorizations].

technorati tags: IBM, DS8000, DS8870, DS8880, DS8884, DS8886, HPFE, HDD, SSD, HMC, KVM, FB, CKD, Easy Tier, FlashCopy, FICON, zHPF, zDDB, all-flash