IBM announced enhancements to its information infrastructure portfolio of high-end enterprise storage products designed to help businesses manage the explosive growth in data and information.
The enhancements to the IBM System Storage DS8000 and the XIV storage system include better performance, security, manageability and business continuity that will help customers reduce costs and energy consumption, while dealing with the increasing volume of information that needs to be stored, managed and analyzed, the vendor says.
IBM's XIV Storage System, a high-end disk storage architecture, will include asynchronous mirroring later this year. This will enable remote disaster site recovery without a limit on distance and without impacting response time and will help customers protect information from local outages, ensuring the continuing availability of critical information. For example, a hospital using the XIV storage system would be able to continuously mirror medical test results to a site thousands of miles away, enabling medical professionals to access patient information at all times.
Additional XIV enhancements include better performance through the introduction of dual processors, offering performance improvements of up to 30%, IBM says. In addition, the XIV system now supports Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), enabling single sign-on and consolidated access control for multiple systems, as well as IBM Tivoli Productivity Center 4.1 support designed to simplify cross-systems management.
IBM also announced the addition of Thin Provisioning to the IBM System Storage DS8000, which supports continuous operations for cross-platform, mission-critical workloads. Thin provisioning capabilities are instrumental in enabling companies to store and access the tremendous amount of information across their organizations, the vendor says. Thin Provisioning also simplifies disk capacity management by automating the provisioning process, which requires minimal administrative oversight.
For additional information, visit the IBM storage site.