ORIGINALLY POSTED 7th November 2012
TOP 10 Post – 62,183 views on developerworks
As you may have seen, today IBM announced the next product in the Storwize family, the IBM Storwize V3700.
The Stowize V3700 builds on the amazing success that the Storwize V7000 has seen in the last two years- and of course SVC has had in the market for almost 10 years now. I could use the work we’ve put in and our general business as an other excuse for why I’ve not posted much recently, but I think thats getting thin, and I figure my PPY (posts per year) are just what they are!
Anyway, the important stuff. The Storwize V3700 is another Hursley developed product, based on the same binary code again that runs in the rest of the Storwize family – that is what we know and love as the SVC code base. The Storwize V3700 is aimed at mid-sized business, but provides the same enterprise class features, functions, reliability and performance as all the other family members. These products have proved themselves to our larger customers to save money, make more efficient use of their storage and provide Smarter Storage to all.
This table shows some of the key differences between Storwize V3700 and V7000.
| Storwize V3700 | Storwize V7000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Control Enclosure | 2U24 / 2U12 | 2U24 / 2U12 |
| Expansion Enclosure | 2U24 / 2U12 | 2U24 / 2U12 |
| Max Expansions | 4 (any form factor) | 9 (any form factor) |
| Total Drives | 60x LFF, 120x SFF | 120x LFF, 240x SFF |
| Cache per system | 8GB (upgradable to 16GB) | 16GB |
| Host Ports per system | 4x 1Gbit iSCSI plus 8x 1Gbit iSCSI or; 8x 8Gbit FC or; 4x 10Gbit FCoE or iSCSI | 4x 1Gbit iSCSI and 8x 8Gbit FC plus 4x 10Gbit FCoE or iSCSI |
The Storwize V3700 comes with 2x 1Gbit iSCSI ports build into the base canister. (Two canisters per Control Enclosure (as per Storwize V7000). There is an optional “HIC” (Host Interface Card) that can be added to each canister. These provide either 4x 1Gbit iSCSI ports, or 4x 8Gbit FC ports, or 2x 10Gbit FCoE / iSCSI ports. Only one HIC can be added to each canister.
The processing power internal to the Storwize V3700 is sized for the lower number of drives it can support, but of course SSD drives can be added, so there is some extra mips left over, as with Storwize V7000 to allow for advanced function and SSD support (such as Easy Tier) while still providing enough horse power to saturate the maximum number of support HDD drives. Look out for some official benchmarks coming soon.
Like Storwize V7000, there is an internal battery in the system that allows for cache saving should input power be lost. Unlike Storwize V7000 (where the battery is in the PSU units themselves) the battery in the Storwize V3700 is in each control canister itself. Ill grab some internal photos in due course.
Advanced features and functions are of course provided and are identical in the most part to the provided by the Storwize V7000 and SVC. Data Migration and Thin provisioning are included in the base system license, while a statement of direction regarding the Easy Tier and licensed features such as FlashCopy and Replication is available on the product pages linked below. The primary difference in features is that Storwize V3700 does not provide support for long term virtualization of external storage. Any storage supported today by the whole family can be attached and the data migrated into the Storwize V3700 internal disks before the outgoing disk controller is retired. Clustering of multiple Storwize V3700 systems is not supported, and if you require the new Real-time Compression functions you will need to look at the Storwize V7000.
The user interface is of course the same award winning GUI thats provided on the rest of the Storwize family.
Finally, you may have already read about the Storwize V3700 on the register. I wanted to respond to a couple of points. First of all this is not a complete replacement for the IBM DS3524 and DCS3700 product ranges. Those will continue to be available along side the Storwize V3700 and customers who have invested in those can continue to grow and expand as required. The IBM DCS3700 product of course provides a high density stoage solution not available with the 2U enclosures on the Storwize V3700. In some of the comments, there was also some FUD references to “DS3500 outperforms Storwize V7000” when comparing two Microsoft Exchange benchmarks. The devil with all performance reports is in the details, and while normally we use the apples for apples statement (this one wasn’t even Granny Smith compared with Golden Delicious) – unless you realised the DS3500 report has 96 apples, and the Storwize V7000 only used 24… (for apples read HDD !)
More to come over the next few days, weeks, but for now, have a look at the product pages where there are some videos, spec sheets and further information.
Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage 
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