IBM has announced enhancements to its storage virtualisation engine software Storage SAN Volume Controller 4.1 (SVC), designed to help organizations virtualize their infrastructures more efficiently and at lower costs over longer distances.
IBM SVC version 4.1 features Global Mirror functionality designed to provide long-distance asynchronous remote replication for business continuity and disaster recovery at nearly unlimited distances.
Built on the Metro Mirror code base already offered in SVC, Global Mirror is designed to maintain a consistent secondary copy of data. With SVC 4.1, Metro and Global Mirror are delivered as a single feature allowing for implementation flexibility and no additional licensing fee for existing Metro Mirror users.
IBM’s replication service allows a client to mix and match arrays between primary and secondary sites to help reduce overall costs.
IBM supports bandwidth 4 Gbps SAN fabrics in new SVC engines therefore enhancing infrastructure simplification capabilities. SVC also helps protect investment as selected existing node models may be upgraded to 4 Gbps and 4Gbps-capable nodes may be intermixed in clusters with 2 Gbps-capable nodes.
The company has extended the new SVC 4.1 to new disk models and server operating systems, including Hitachi TagmaStore and OpenVMS. Also supported are new disk systems from IBM, HP, and Network Appliance, bringing the total number of environments supported to nearly 80.
The new product features cluster non-disruptive upgrade unique to SVC, whic is designed to enable customers to replace current SVC engines with new ones without disrupting access to data, ultimately building a foundation for continued infrastructure growth through deployment of more advanced technology.
IBM this month announced it had surpassed 2,000 SVC customers who are virtualizing more than 15 petabytes of data. The IT research firm IDC recently reported that the installed base of appliance-based, virtualized networked storage capacity was 28.1 petabytes at the end of 2005. Based on this information, IBM believes that SVC manages more than half of the appliance-based virtualized storage capacity in the market today.
IBM said in addition to the business continuity enhancements announced today, SVC 4.1 now supports four gigabits per second (Gbps) environments and has extended its capabilities to virtualize data on nearly 80 different disk systems.
"IBM continues to expand the reach and capabilities of its storage virtualization software by incorporating features that will help customers achieve their business goals and bottom-line targets," said Kristie Bell, vice president, System Storage Marketing, IBM. "Compared to the previous version, our enhanced storage virtualization software provides increased flexibility, ease of management and improved business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities, empowering customers to architect their information on demand environments to be more resilient, dynamic and flexible, regardless of where the data resides."
IBM SVC 4.1 will be available on June 23 with combined hardware and software list pricing starting at USD 42,500.
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