IBM N7000 User Manual

Designed as reliable, powerful, scalable modular storage systems

■

Scalable—Designed for non-

disruptive expansion to more

than 1.1 petabytes (1.1 PB, or

1100 TB) storage capacity

■

Versatile—Single, integrated

architecture designed to sup-

port concurrent block I/O and

file ser

ving over Ethernet

and Fibre Channel SAN

infrastructures

■

Flexible—Fibre Channel and

SAT

A disk-drive capabilities

allow for deployment in multiple

solution environments, includ-

ing data retention, near-line

storage, disk-to-disk backup

scenarios and high-

performance, mission-critical

I/O intensive operations

■

Efficient consolidation—

Intended to provide storage for

multiple applications in a single

system with FlexShare™ to

ensure that critical workloads

get priority service

■

Application availability—N7000

systems with Data ONTAP

®

enable application-level recov-

ery in minutes, not hours, upon

failure or user error

■

Performance—Delivers high,

consistent performance for

mission-critical applications

In an increasingly demanding and com-

petitive business landscape, effective

data management is essential to the

success of the enterprise. Data avail-

ability from any location gives employ-

ees, partners and customers the

up-to-the-minute information they need

to work pr

oductively

, make timely deci-

sions and meet business goals.

Information technology professionals

facing these challenges are under pres-

sure to deliver more capacity and at

higher levels of service. Yet critical

resources—staffing, budget, power,

cooling and floor space—are often

constrained.

These demands call for enterprise-class

storage systems with the flexibility to

support changing IT requirements,

accommodate continuous data growth,

satisfy application-level service r

equire-

ments and unify SAN and NAS infra-

structures with the expectation of

reducing overall costs.

offering a unified storage architecture—with exceptional value—
for large-enterprise data center applications and consolidations

IBM System Storage N7000 Modular
Disk Storage Systems

Highlights

The challenge: Managing data for business

antage

adv

The solution: IBM System Storage N7000

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, pr

ovides powerful virtualization

and thin-pr

ovisioning capabilities

designed to maximize storage utilization

and staf

f 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 ar

e 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.

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-

figur

ed 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

of

fers 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 ar

chi-

tectur

e of the N7000 series can help

eliminate the need to manage separate

NAS and SAN storage by pr

oviding

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

pr

ovided by FlexVol®, volumes can be

expanded and contracted automatically

without IT staff intervention or disruption

to applications.

series

Designed to support scalability, versatility,

flexibility, reliability and availability with

outstanding value

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 r

esponse 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 featur

es 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 compr

ehensive 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

pr

evious 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 ar

e 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.