News

posted on 27 August 2008 07:58

What is it about EMC? First it helps drive news of IBM's soft-pedal launch of its XIV and now it reveals another soft pedal launch of a new mid-range DS5000 storage array.

The DS5000 (left) seems to be a replacement for the existing DS4000 with the ability to use DS4000 EXP810 storage expansion units and so provide an upgrade path. It consists of a 4U controller box and up to 16 3U expansion units holding 16 1TB SATA drives or 16 450GB Fibre Channel (FC) drives. In other words a full rack DS5000 can hold 256TB of SATA storage.

These expansion boxes connect to the controllers by 4Gbit/s FC links which, in turn, connect to the outside world by 4Gbits/FC with 4 or 8 links per controller (max 2 controllers). These external links have been designed so that their number, their speed and their type can be changed over time. Here is a hint that 8Gbit/s FC and FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) could be introduced later, iSCSI too I suppose.

There are two controllers; the 5100 with 8GB cache and the 5300 with 16GB cache. The former can be upgraded to the latter. The DS5000 is said to have twice the IOPS performance of the DS4800. The software has the DS4000 Storage Manager and capabilities such as flash copy, volume copy, remote mirror, RAID (0,1, 3, 5, 6, 10), and 8 - 512 partitions. Download an IBM description document below.

Compared to EMC's new Clariion CX4 there is no iSCI support, no thin provisioning, no spin-down and no solid state drive (SSD) support.

In the great scheme of things this is just a mid-range refresh. (DS4800 controller left. Spot the difference from the DS5000 above.) It upgrades the DS4800 drives from 750GB SATA to 1TB, and from 300GB FC to 450GB. It increases the drive count from 224 to 256. It adds RAID 6 and it boosts IOPS performance. Nothing revolutionary but good solid progress. So why not put out a good blast on the press release trumpet? When contacted an IBM press spokesperson couldn't immediately respond. Exactly. You find out more by reading Chuck Hollis' blog.

There is no pricing information and the DS5000 should be available in September.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}
 

Download file: DS5000 PDF 27 Aug 08.PDF