IBM has combined best-of-breed development with leading 6 Gbps host interface and drive technology in the IBM System Storage DS3500 Express. With its simple, efficient and flexible approach tostorage, the DS3500 is a cost-effective, fully integrated complement to IBM System xservers, IBM BladeCenter and IBM Power Systems.Offering substantial improvements at a price that fits most budgets, the DS3500 delivers superior price to performance ratios, functionality,scalability and ease of use for the entry-level storage user.

DS3500 Express offers:

• Scalability to midrange performance and features starting at entry-level prices.
• Efficiency to help reduce annual energy expenditures and environmental footprint.
• Simplicity that does not sacrifice control with the perfect combination of robustness and se of use.

Six Gbps SAS: Midrange performance andscalability at entry-level prices

   Six Gbps SAS is the enterprise version of SAS building on the solid foundation of 3 Gbps SAS technology. Six Gbps SAS offers increased performance, scalability and reliability enhancements to support the ever-increasing reliance on information while delivering the outstanding value that organizations demand.

Delivering solid input and output per second (IOPS) and throughput, the DS3500 controllers offer balanced and sustainable performance. With up to 4,000 Mbps and 40,000 IOPS in sustained drive reads, the DS3500 is equally adept at delivering throughput to bandwidth-intensive applications and IOPS to databases and Microsoft Exchange.

DS3500 has enhanced scalability up to 576 TB when fully expanded up to 192 drives. By dynamically adding drive enclosures (up to 15 EXP3512, 7 EXP3524 expansion enclosures or a mix of the two) with virtually no downtime, you can quickly and seamlessly respond to growing capacity demands. This scalability also improves overall system performance by distributing the server’s input/output (I/O) requests across a greater number of drives.

Energy saving implementations for costsavings today and tomorrow

   With rising energy expenses and IT space constraints, efforts to reduce power consumption in a small IT footprint have quickly come to the forefront as hot-button IT issues for many organizations. To respond to these challenges, IBM has made great strides in energy efficient implementations with the DS3500 by introducing new power saving features designed to have no impact on performance, scalability or functionality.

Smaller form-factor 2.5-inch SAS drives, one of multiple drives supported by the DS3500, provide up to three times the IOPS per watt in power consumption than 3.5-inch drives and enable twice as many drives to reside in the same 2U of rack space. These drives also deliver impressive IOPS performance in a small form-factor with minimal impact on power consumption or heat dissipation.

Energy-efficient power supplies help ensure just that—energy efficiency. By efficiently converting AC power from electric utilities into DC power used by the storage system, the DS3500 power supplies ensure that overall annual expenditures are lower than other, less efficient implementations. And withlow heat dissipation, the DS3500 becomes a key component of an overall energy-saving and green solution.

With a DC-powered model for 24-drive enclosures and NEBS and ETSI compliance, the DS3500 offers savings in energy expenses, meets standard telecommunications requirements, and minimizes risk in harsh environments.

The DS3500 continues the tradition of superior disk use that enables IBM customers to achieve maximum return on investment (ROI) on their storage investment. The DS series can deliver up to nearly two times the disk use of leading competitors, allowing organizations to achieve maximum performance with fewer drives and less energy consumption.

Intuitive, simple storage managementthat doesn’t sacrifice control

   Blending the ease of use and intuitive nature of the DS3000 Storage Manager as well as the robustness and functionality previously only available on the DS5000 and DS4000, thenew DS Storage Manager for the DS3500 delivers a simplestorage management interface that provides great control while maintaining its simplicity. The DS3500 now offers dynamic andother high-functionality capabilities which, in the previous generation of management software, were only available through the command line interface. This capability allows administrators to make changes to their configurations on the fly with no downtime. The new DS Storage Manager graphical userinterface (GUI) was designed for both experienced full-time storage administrators who want complete control over their storage configuration as well as part-time system administrators who desire an intuitive interface that ensures optimal storageuse with the least amount of effort.

A singular DS Storage Manager with remote mirroring

   The DS3500 DS Storage Manager is the same management software offered with the DS5000 and DS4000 series. Now any of these storage systems can be viewed and managed from a single interface. This allows for consolidated management of these various storage systems as well as a reduced learningcurve. The DS3500 also supports enhanced remote mirroring over Fibre Channel host ports, which is also compatible with the DS5000 and DS4000 series. This allows for low-cost backup and recovery with a DS5000 and DS4000 at a production site and a DS3500 at the secondary site.

Mixed host interfaces support enables DAS and SAN tiering

   Administrators can now benefit from tiered DAS and SAN implementations with multi-protocol host connectivity. The DS3500 supports intermixing four 1 Gbps iSCSI, two 10 GbpsiSCSI—dual ported or four 8 Gbps Fibre Channel host ports with its native 6 Gbps SAS interfaces. This flexible and multi-purpose dual protocol approach allows organizations toimplement a single storage system to support all of their shared storage requirements, to help improve productivity, reliability,and cost.