News and Information on IBM’s N series

Do you have older storage on your floor taking up space and is too costly to replace?  Why not use a N series Gateway to help add value to that asset and ‘recycle’ the storage for other uses.  We are all looking for ways to do more with fewer resources and demand on IT keeps getting larger.

N series storage can use older disk subsystems at the same time using its own native disks.  It allows clients to use technology like deduplication, snapshots and thin provisioning with out having to rip and replace your existing footprint.  The Gateway uses the underlying storage structure’s RAID for protection so there is no bloat with additional raid from the gateway itself.

If you have multiple storage units, no problem.  We can connect via Fibre Channel to multiple storage platforms.  This allows us to create teirs of storage for your applications so that slower systems are used for archives and faster systems are used for production data.  Once the gateway is configured, the N series will present data just as if the disk were native.

We also add value for systems that don’t support certain technologies.  For example, if you are interested in moving into 10Gbps networking.  N series is the only platform that supports it at this time.  You could use your storage system that you have now, put a gateway in front of it with a 10Gbps card and voila’.  It is that easy.

Now you don’t have to use older storage appliance behind a gateway, we are using gateways in front of XiV, SVC and DS5k /8k.  Now if you are looking for just Fibre Channel attachment this might not be a good fit but if you are looking for multiprotocol, application integration with Exchange/SQL/Oracle/VMware and the like.  We can use the underlying storage system and make it more productive with the N series portfolio.

Other uses for a Gateway include disaster recovery, archiving, VDI projects, Dev and Test environments and much more.  We see Gateways being used for data migrations, for site to site mirroring and recovery of data centers.

For more information about N series Gateways, check out the IBM site for N series