IBM offers information storage platform for small and medium businesses

IBM has announced enhancements to disk and tape storage solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs), offering increased performance and simplicity with lower cost. New functionality across the IBM System Storage DS3000 and DS4000 disk series, as well as IBM System Storage TS2240 Tape products add scalability and broaden support for customers while helping to decrease cost.
"Small and medium businesses tend to be budget conscience organizations, yet they are seeing rapidly changing industry landscapes and immense data growth. They need technology that will allow them to stay ahead of the curve without breaking the bank," said Susan Blocher, Vice President, IBM System Storage Marketing. "We are committed to supporting our SMB customers' information storage needs, from basic backup and recovery to compliance and archive initiatives -- all with a focus on simplicity and reduced costs."

Disk Storage Solutions for SMBs

The IBM System Storage DS3000 disk product series has been expanded to include low-cost Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) support as well as support for IBM System p servers and IBM BladeCenter Power blades. Customers can now intermix SAS and SATA drives on the DS3000 series to allow for increased flexibility in cost and performance. These enhancements expand the scalability and support of IBM's entry-level disk storage solutions and offer new lower cost options to customers.

Additionally, the IBM System Storage DS4000 series midrange disk storage offerings of high-performance, high-availability, business-critical storage solutions have been turbo-charged with new software functions and features delivered through enhancements in DS4000 Storage Manager Software across the DS4800, DS4700 Express, and the DS4200 Express products. These enhancements will offer:

· Support for RAID 6 on the DS4700 Express models and the DS4200 Express, giving customers improved data availability during drive rebuild operations
· Support for greater than 2 TB volumes on selected supported operating systems
· Increased number of Flash Copies available per storage controller
· Up to 64 enhanced remote mirror pairs on the DS4700 and DS4200, and up to 128 on the DS4800 offering customers increased options for disaster recovery
· Enhanced cache utilization further improving performance
· Tiered performance license key for DS4800 Model 80 enabling a performance boost "on demand"
· Up to 128 storage partitions on the DS4700 Express and DS4200 Express, and up to 512 on the DS4800, enabling a range of hosts with different capacity, performance, or data protection demands to effectively share a single DS4000 storage system

DS4000 Series is delivering real business value to SMB clients with scalable solutions enabling business growth and designed to provide savings and investment protection with low total cost of ownership.

Midrange Tape Storage

Additionally, IBM today announced the IBM System Storage TS2240 Tape Drive Express Model LTO 4 Half-High, a high performance tape storage solution that offers enterprise-level encryption with a small size and low cost. The TS2240 offers 120 MB/sec performance native data transfer rate; 800 GB of capacity (up to 1.6 TB at 2:1 compression); continued media support of prior LTO generations; application-managed encryption; and 3 Gbps Serial Attached Storage (SAS) attachment availability. It is an ideal tape storage solution for smaller businesses with constrained resources, limited IT personnel and restricted floor space that still demand high capacity, leading performance and secure data.

The TS2240 offers higher capacity and higher performance than other existing half-height drives in the market, delivering more value to customers. For applications or IT environments requiring maximum capacity, the TS2240 drive technology continues to provide the same compatible LTO technology standards upon which many SMBs depend. The security features of the TS2240 have also been enhanced from previous generations with application-managed encryption of data installed in the drive and the option of whether or not to encrypt data.
The IBM System Storage TS2240 will be available on November 16, 2007 with a starting price of $4,500.

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