14 DAY TRIAL // Data center virtualization is nothing new as big enterprises and corporations are using it all the time in order to cut costs and keep their servers busy around the clock instead of using a far greater number of separated hardware and software platforms. As the virtualization trend hits the small and medium businesses too, a previously rarely used protocol is having a field day as hardware manufacturers and vendors are offering new gear featuring the iSCSI standard.
Among the companies that are using iSCSI as a storage solution there is the giant server manufacturer IBM that announced the launch of an entry level and cheap solution, the DS3000 series. The DS3000 series is aimed at providing the SMB market segment with a practical networking storage alternative to the use of the less popular Fibre Channel and it comes in the form of a 2U rack mount with a maximum capacity of 12 SAS hard disk drives that are offering a maximum storage space of 3.6TB. Conceived as a practical replacement for the DAS, direct attached storage, the IBM DS3000 can be scaled using the EXP3000 disk racks in order to reach a storage capacity of 14.4TB, while also supporting some data protection systems like FlashCopy and VolumeCopy in order to provide full volume copies of important data and full logical drive replication.
As the DS3000 represents the third system built by IBM that uses the iSCSI standard and because the other two systems did not enjoy a wide market acceptance, the manufacturing company teamed up with networking guru Cisco Systems to build an iSCSI adapter product. The DS3000 network attached storage system will be available starting on the 7th of September and it will come with a starting price tag of around $5,000 for the simplest configuration, while the dual-controller box will cost twice more.
"SMBs continue to face the same issues that large enterprises are dealing with when it comes to the deluge of data - they are seeing an ever-increasing amount of feature-rich documents, limitless e-mails, audio and video files, data-intensive new applications, and a slew of government regulations by which they must abide," said Charlie Andrews, an IBM System Storage marketing executive who was cited by the news site theregister. As the iSCSI enabled system is more versatile than the Fibre Channel standard, IBM may very well gain a big chunk of the SMB storage market before competitors like Dell, Ag?mi Systems and LeftHand Networks decide to move in on that particular market segment with their own product offerings.