You might assume that with a well-deserved reputation for stability and dependability, DS8880 technology rarely changes. After all, why tinker with a very successful recipe? But the truth is, IBM is constantly engineering new functionality and increased capabilities into DS8880 platforms.

DS8880 storage systems are where you turn when your mission-critical applications require the highest availability and system reliability possible, especially in mainframe environments. Designed to manage the full spectrum of storage workloads that exist in today’s complex IT infrastructures, DS8880 systems can get more than “six-nines” availability while offering superior performance,  and industry-leading data protection and disaster recovery features.

The DS8880 family currently includes three all-flash members that together provide a broad range of options for addressing business-critical application workloads:

• The DS8884F is the business class family member, offering entry level storage for high availability environments with all-flash performance delivered within a flexible and space-saving package. DS8884F offers the lowest entry cost for midrange enterprises, yet features two IBM Power Systems S822 storage servers with six processor cores each for a robust 256GB total system DRAM cache and up to 154TB of flash capacity.


• The enterprise class DS8886F is designed with a powerful combination of performance, capacity, and cost efficiency to support a wide variety of application workloads. It provides higher performance via two IBM Power Systems S824 servers each with 24-core POWER8 processors. The DS8886F has a 2TB DRAM cache includes 128 Fibre Channel/FICON ports, and offers up to 614.4TB of flash capacity.


• DS8888F is our analytics class storage system, offering superior performance and capacity designed to address the most demanding business workload requirements. Its two IBM Power Systems E850 servers each with 48-core POWER8 processors provide superior performance, and the system offers up to 1.22PB of all-flash capacity to handle big data analytics workload.

Maintaining its reputation for world-class dependability has not slowed the IBM DS8880 family from aggressively innovating. Data protection, a very important function, in mission-critical environments where DS8880 systems are deployed mandates systems resiliency.  This is a cornerstone of the DS8880 system architecture.

While the availability of higher capacity drives provide real cost advantages, enterprises are also exposed to increased risks.  Rebuilding a high capacity drive takes proportionately more time, stretching into many hours and even days in some cases. Enterprises experience greater risk during these drive rebuilds due to the chance of a second drive failure that can result in actual loss of data.

To address these challenges, the DS8880 family has implemented RAID 6 to provide greater system resiliency and data protection (Re-Evaluating RAID-5 and RAID-6). The family also leverages IBM Smart Rebuild technology, which uses predictive sparing of drives to help enable faster drive rebuilds by making copies of data rather than performing full rebuilds. In addition to greatly speeding this process, Smart Rebuild technology  can help reduce the probability of experiencing a double drive failure.

These business and technology win-win scenarios are what can result from innovative engineering on systems with very mature and stable foundational components. The move to RAID 6 offers yet another example of how DS8880 storage solutions both enable you to have innovation and peace of mind about your data protection.

In mission-critical and mainframe environments where DS8880 systems are typically deployed, the higher performance and generally lower operating costs offered by flash storage are especially attractive. In fact, nearly 75% of all business revenue will be flash-based by 2020.[1] Given the constant budget pressures experienced by these environments, IBM has relentlessly pushed the boundaries of flash performance, efficiency, and positive economics. This is reflected in the enhanced flash enclosures now available with DS8884F, DS8886F, and DS8888F models.

The new flash offerings leverage the advantages of much larger 3.2TB flash drives in a 2U enclosure filled with mature technology that has already been deployed in other IBM storage systems, so the risks of introducing unproven technology is reduced. The larger drives dramatically increase the flash storage density, enabling each enclosure to provide 220% more flash capacity than the previous solutions available with the DS8880 family . Along with greater individual enclosure capacity comes much higher scalability, all the way to more than a petabyte under a single management console.

Performance follows the same trajectory. The enhanced flash enclosures offer up to 2.5 million IOPS, double that of previous configurations and consuming less power than traditional spindles.

DS8880 family solutions are growing faster and more affordable with every iteration. Dependability and innovation in one platform - it’s a combination that provides competitive advantage to the most successful enterprises in the 21^st century.

To find out more visit the DS8888F webpage.

[1] IDC: Worldwide External Enterprise Storage Systems Forecast, 2016–2020, July 2016
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