IBM N7000 - Manual (Page 3)

Another feature of the N series Data
ONTAP operating system, FlexClone®,
enables the nearly instant creation of
clones without requiring incremental
storage. FlexClone can dramatically
accelerate test and development cycles
for IT projects.
Efficient consolidation. The N7000
series is designed to consolidate
and serve data for a wide variety of
workloads, including mission-critical
business applications, technical appli­
cations, databases, e-mail, home direc­
tories, digital media, backup and
recovery, regulatory compliant data
retention and archival. IBM N series
systems support Windows®, UNIX®,
including AIX®, Solaris™ and HP-UX,
and Linux® host operating systems as
well as VMware for server virtualization.
IT organizations can be challenged with
poor response times during peak hours
of operations after consolidating stor­
age systems with dissimilar data work­
loads on to a single platform. To help
address this challenge, N series offers
FlexShare quality-of-service software,
which is intended to enable storage
administrators to set and dynamically
adjust workload priorities. FlexShare
can help ensure that important applica­
tions get fast response times.
Application availability. N7000 sys­
tems combine a variety of features to
meet the need for continuous availabil­
ity. Complementing the high-availability
hardware design is the proven reliability
of the Data ONTAP operating system
and RAID-DP™ (N series implementa­
tion of RAID-6), which uniquely provides
double-level RAID data protection to
help ensure that data is not lost in the
event of multiple disk drive failures. In
addition, RAID-DP has negligible per­
formance impact. The N7000 also sup­
ports simple yet powerful synchronous,
semi-synchronous and asynchronous
mirroring that can be deployed
in one-to-one, one-to-many and many-
to-one mirroring configurations.
The N7000 can serve as the foundation
for a comprehensive data management
solution consisting of hardware, soft­
ware and services. With an appliance
architecture and built-in backup and
recovery software, an N7000 solution is
designed to address the entire spec­
trum of data availability challenges while
offering value in price/performance and
scalability.
Ultimately what matters is application-
level availability, and this is where
N series systems excel. Snapshot™, a
standard feature of Data ONTAP, makes
it possible to instantly revert to a
previous version of data upon failure or
user error. N series Snapshot copies
are unique in that they can be created
frequently during production, because
they use only a small amount of incre­
mental storage and have virtually no
impact on performance. Host-based
SnapManager® software integrates
Snapshot management with applica­
tions, designed to ensure consistent
backup images and application-level
recovery in minutes.
Performance. High performance and
massive storage capacity are character­
istics that make the N7000 systems
ideal for large-scale applications and
storage consolidation. An N7000 sys­
tem is designed to complete jobs
quickly and handle a large number of
users via a powerful, high-bandwidth
architecture with scalability to
1,176 disk drives capable of delivering
up to 1.176 PB of raw storage capacity.
With large cache memory configura­
tions, expandable high-performance
I/O, 4 Gbps FC SAN support, 4 Gbps
disk drive support and support for
10 Gbps Ethernet, the N7000 delivers
exceptional enterprise-class system
performance.