IBM N7000 - Manual (Page 2)

The solution: IBM System Storage N7000
series
The IBM System Storage™ N7000
series systems are intended to help IT
organizations tackle the challenge of
effective data management using virtu­
alization technology and a unified stor­
age architecture. The N7000 series is
designed to deliver high-end enterprise
storage and data management value
with midrange affordability. Built-in
enterprise serviceability and managea­
bility features help support your efforts
to increase reliability, simplify and unify
storage infrastructure and maintenance,
and deliver exceptional economy.
The N7000 series, like all N series sys­
tems, provides powerful virtualization
and thin-provisioning capabilities
designed to maximize storage utilization
and staff productivity while minimizing
the use of power, cooling and floor
space. Staff productivity can be
enhanced by an integrated suite of
application-aware manageability soft­
ware that can provide policy-based
automation to otherwise manual tasks.
The IBM N7000 series is designed to
provide remarkable versatility by unify­
ing FC SAN, iSCSI SAN, NAS, primary,
nearline and regulatory compliance data
retention and archival storage in a sin­
gle integrated architecture. N series
systems are designed for easy installa­
tion, configuration, management and
expansion. The combination of versatil­
ity and simplicity of N series systems is
intended to help IT professionals
respond quickly to changing business
needs.
The N7000 series combines the bene­
fits of a unified storage architecture
suite of application-aware software with
massive scalability, which is intended to
provide an ideal platform for large-scale
data center applications and storage
consolidations.
Designed to support scalability, versatility,
flexibility, reliability and availability with
outstanding value
Scalability. The N7000 series is
designed to meet the massive storage
scalability and I/O scalability needs that
are critical in large data center environ­
ments. The N7900 system can be con­
figured with 1.176 PB of raw storage
capacity using up to 1,176 disk drives.
The N7700 system can support 840 TB
of capacity using as many as 840 disk
drives.
Both the N7900 and the N7700 sys­
tems offer high-bandwidth controller
designs, which can be in an active-
active configuration. Each system
offers sixteen 4-Gbps Fibre Channel
(FC) ports and twelve Gigabit Ethernet
(GbE) ports standard with the system’s
ten PCI-e and six PCI-x expansion slots
that can accommodate quad-port
4-Gbps FC adapter cards and ten GbE
adapter cards. For additional connectiv­
ity, the N7000 series can expand to a
maximum of 56 Fibre Channel ports
and 52 Ethernet ports.
Versatility. The unified storage archi­
tecture of the N7000 series can help
eliminate the need to manage separate
NAS and SAN storage by providing
concurrent support for block and file
protocols via Ethernet and Fibre
Channel interfaces. With support for
Fibre Channel and SATA hard drives,
the N7000 product line also has the
flexibility to be used for primary and
secondary tiered storage.
Storage provisioning can take hours on
other storage systems but with N series
system’s thin provisioning capabilities
provided by FlexVol®, volumes can be
expanded and contracted automatically
without IT staff intervention or disruption
to applications.