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.

It is however disappointing to see that there's still no sign of replication via the iSCSI interface. The ability to replicate cheaply using a standard LES without the need for expensive FCIP gateways would be rather nice. Come on LSI, this would be a killer feature for SMEs wanting cheap remote office replication out of the box!

Note that like the HP servers this unit no longer uses SATA drives, but instead has the concept of "Nearline (NL) SAS" which is basically a slow SATA disk spindle with a SAS interface. This improves throughput slightly as the SATA protocol is somewhat antiquated and inefficient compared to SAS, provides redundant ports, and both SAS and SATA these days use the same wire protocol so hardware costs are the same. Be sure to watch out for this difference when comparing quotes. Note that other DS3000 disks are not supported with the DS3500.

As for what you'd want the DS3500 for, it's suitable for anywhere you're after storage with less than 40,000 IOPs usage. It's a low horsepower box so you won't get your entire datacenter running off one, however for a few isolated Exchange or database servers the unit looks quite attractive. AIX should be supported as well, however bear in mind that HACMP support is still under testing.