Ibm DS4700 EXPRESS User Manual

This paper describes the move to 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel, the benefits and the
major applications that will benefit from this newest interconnect technology.

4 Gb/s Fibre Channel
Storage System

The IBM®
TotalStorage®
DS4800 controller,
features sixth
generation system
technology and offers
the same extensive
capabilities and
functionality as other
IBM DS4000 series
Fibre Channel
systems. These
capabilities include
broad support for
operating systems and
host types; advanced
replication services
such as Snapshot,
remote volume
mirroring and volume
copying.

Introduction

Since the 2001 introduction of 2 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) Fibre Channel
(FC) technology, engineers have been working on the next generation of
Fibre Channel interconnection – 4 Gb/s. The new technology is now
available, thoroughly tested and offered to enterprise customers.

4 Gb/s Fibre Channel systems are ideally suited for applications that need
to quickly transfer large amounts of data – such as remote replication
across a SAN, database in memory; streaming video on demand; medical
imaging; data mining and data warehousing; and large databases
supporting online transaction processing (OLTP). Additionally, large
increases in online data, such as driven by radio frequency identification
(RFID) applications, will leverage the benefits of 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel
technology.

Why buy 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel technology?

The potential benefits of 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel technology include
between servers and storage devices
to server or restore data from online backup media; high reliability due to the number of
connections; and investment protection due to backward compatibility with 1 Gb/s and 2
Gb/s components – providing customers with state-of-the-art interconnection technology
at about the same price and cost of ownership as current 2 Gb/s systems.

Some of the Killer Apps for 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel

The information explosion continues to drive the need for higher-performance
communication. Performance improvements in processors, workstations and storage
devices, along with the exponential growth in the amount of data being gathered and
created, have spawned increasingly data-intensive and high-speed networking
applications. 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel enables faster communication between servers and
storage devices at about the same prices as today’s 2 Gb/s Fibre Channel, helping IT

, the ability to more rapidly transfer data from storage

faster communication

administrators to effectively address the relentless needs of applications and end users.

Tiered Storage
As the concept of storage tiers becomes more prevalent and implementations become

more common, data will need to be routinely migrated from primary storage to secondary
storage across the storage network. Depending on the amount of data being relocated, this
can be a time-consuming and costly process that can put a tremendous strain on the
storage network and potentially disrupt access to the data during the migration. 4 Gb/s
Fibre Channel provides a massive pipe through the SAN that allows data to be quickly
moved from one storage system to another - enabling this bandwidth-intensive transfer to
happen at up to twice the speed of 2 Gb/s Fibre Channel.

Campus area replication
While wide area network (WAN) replication can help provide outstanding protection

against regional disasters, campus area replication can be just as beneficial. When
replicating across the high-speed SAN, data can be mirrored synchronously, so the
remote site has the same data as the local site at all times. The data at the remote site can
then be used for a variety of purposes, such as data restoration, mining, analysis, testing
and backup. Synchronizing and re-synchronizing the local and remote sites can be a
lengthy process that monopolizes a large portion of the SAN's bandwidth. 4 Gb/s Fibre
Channel provides these environments with a high-bandwidth infrastructure well suited for
campus area replication.
4 Gb/s Fibre Channel enables data to be transferred from one system at up to twice the
speed of 2 Gb/s Fibre Channel.

Streaming Video
4 Gb/s Fibre Channel is ideal for world-class broadcasting and rich media storage

networks. Large block, sequential I/O applications that include content creation and
delivery, modeling, rendering, and publishing, may benefit from the additional bandwidth
that 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel provides.

Large Data Analysis
A 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel storage network can help companies accelerate and scale

simulation, visualization, modeling and rendering applications simply and easily to help:

• Tremendously accelerate large dataset I/O rates;

• Share information across the organization for the highest level of collaboration;

• Enable shared file systems, via 3rd parties, to scale to higher levels of

performance ;

• Simplify data management and consolidation to allow managing up to 90
terabytes, behind a single pair of controllers