The DS3000 subsystems become less of a range with the announcement of the DS3500, as it's a bit of a jack of all trades which outdoes all its smaller siblings. Available June 15th there are two versions, the DS3512 and DS3524 supporting either 3.5" and 2.5" disks, with 12 or 24 disks accordingly. There are also EXP3512 and EXP3524 expansion enclosures to match. Both units are 2U high, and this basically brings the DS range into line with the HP MSA2000 range in terms of spindle capacity and density, to the point that the only real difference is the GUI used to manage it.

Of most note with the DS3500 are the changeable host interfaces similar to the DS5020/DS3950, which means that the DS3500 can have a mix of four 6Gbps SAS and an optional four more SAS connections, eight 8Gbps FC or eight 1Gbit iSCSI ports. If you have the FC ports, unlike the smaller DS3000 units the DS3500 *will* support remote mirroring between the DS3500 and any other DS3500/DS4000 or DS5000 subsystem.

LTO-5 has now been announced for the IBM tape range... well, the TS3100, TS3200, and TS3500 anyway. If you want LTO-5 for the TS3310 unfortunately you'll have to wait a little bit longer.

A quick technical summary, LTO-5 has a native data transfer of up to 140 MB/sec. and a 1.5 TB Data Cartridge uncompressed, or up to 3TB with the drive's 2:1 compression. It also continues to follow the LTO standard of writing back one generation and reading back two, ensuring that your LTO-3 and LTO-4 tapes still have some life in them. Finally  the drive also has a 8-Gbps Fibre Channel dual-ported interface on the back end, so you can finally have a more resilient connection through to the drive itself when connected to a SAN.

Storage at it's most fundamental level is a bucket, where you store useful stuff that you may or may not want again later. Of course what you put that stuff into can vary in design; it might not be a bucket but a box instead, or a sieve, or a safe, or the dog's basket because he never sleeps in the damned thing anyway. Likewise with disk based storage there are various methods to implement a storage subsystem design, all slightly different, all have their own way of doing things.

As much as I'd like to say that IBM is faultless and standing proud above the competition, I can't say that in good conscience. Sometimes I feel nothing but frustration towards IBM and their desire to make things so unnecessarily complex and difficult. This is especially true when it comes to customer support, though in fairness to IBM this seems to be a common trend with most hardware or software vendors these days.

As a result I sometimes see support as a "wall". Not because a wall is a fundamental element to any building providing both reinforcement and safety for the overall structure, but simply because that's what it feels like my head is banging against when I'm talking with them.

It seems that IBM hasn't slowed down the development of TSM since migrating the internal database to a DB2 database, as TSM v6.2 has just been announced this week. Availability will be electronic from March 19th, with physical media a month later. (Not that many people rely on physical media for software distribution these days.)

There's some interesting new features as well with this release. The most notable feature is block-level deduplication at the client level, so if you've got a client with a lot of similar files then this feature can provide significant benefit. both in terms of storage and network utilisation. Note that this dedupes at the client level, not the server, so if two clients have the same files this feature will not dedupe between those clients. {Edit: I'm told it's actually cross-client, however I'll wait until the official documentation is available before making further comment.) If you want cross-client dedupe then this can be achieved via other means, such as file based disk storage pools or deduped based storage at the back-end.

In our second part of "Solid State of the Art?" we're looking at how to use Solid State Drives, what applications we can best use them for, and what the future holds for SSD technology.

Believe it or not (or simply check Wikipedia), Solid State Drives (SSDs) have been around in their current form for nearly thirty years, however it's only within the past two years that they've really managed to gain any ground in more mainstream corporate usage. In this article I'll be discussing the various aspects of these drives, and when and where to use them.

It's been a busy couple of months within IBM, and it seems that in this case Christmas has come early as we're getting a sneak peak at the toys under the tree. So we've got an interesting line up of new products to cover over the next month, some of which you may already have heard about. However here's an easy one to start with, the "EXP5060" or "1818-G1A" in IBM terms.

For the past couple of years the DS4000 and DS5000 series of storage has only had the one expansion enclosure to choose from, the EXP810 or the EXP520 respectively. Sixteen disks up front, power and connectivity in the back, 3U in height, and a selection of SATA and FC disks in various sizes. However there's now an additional option for disk expansion, the EXP5060.

Over the past few months there's been a lot of focus and marketing on the part of IBM about it's latest storage subsystem, the "XIV". Everyone's been going on about the performance or the architecture, or how it takes commodity parts and uses them in supposedly clever ways, evangelising until they're all IBM blue in the face. I find XIV an interesting concept but it's still too early in the product's development for XIV to really show its strengths as a flexible, versatile storage platform.

However there is another element to XIV that's really being overlooked by all this hype. It's nothing to do with the performance, availability, or even the cost of the unit. It's the XIV's GUI.

Within the storage arena the marketeers would seem to have us believe that it's the approach of some kind of Armageddon, that the world as we know it is about to end. We have buzzwords floating around at the moment such as the "INFORMATION EXPLOSION" or the "DATA TIDAL WAVE". While the management of data growth is a serious business issue that requires focused attention, frankly I've never considered storage to be so exciting as to describe it as if it were some action-packed movie extravaganza. Any more of this and I expect to see Bruce Willis run from the server room screaming "Clear the building, the data's about to blow!", and some hysterical office worker scream in response "Oh my God, will somebody think of the backups!?!". I can't help but feel the terminology and the graphics being used for this issue is somewhat overly purile and childish, and that can only help to weaken the issue of data management in people's minds. Therefore in response I thought we'd have a bit of fun and prompt our blog readers for a few more ridiculous terms that marketeers could use in their place. Here's a few to kick off...

• Storage Tsunami
• Terabyte Terrorism
• Hard Disk Hurricane
• Information Avalanche
• Missing the Data-Bus

Over to you!