IBM TotalStorage DS4000 Series: Delivering Mid-Range Storage Capacity and Performance

Affordable, High Bandwidth Performance for Your Business Critical Applications

The IBM TotalStorage DS4000 series of Storage Area Network (SAN) storage solutions includes the DS4100, the DS4200, the DS4300, the DS4400, the DS4500, the DS4700 and the DS4800. There are several key differences between the various DS4000 SAN models including the type of disk drives that they support, the number of disk drives they accommodate and the level of storage capacity that they can scale to. However, all IBM DS4000 series SAN systems feature a high bandwidth performance, maxing out at 1600Mbps of sustained bandwidth. As a result, the entire IBM DS4000 series product line is well-suited for high-throughput and data-intensive applications.

Featuring Support for FC and SATA Protocols – You Can Even Intermix the Two

The various models of the IBM TotalStorage DS4000 SAN family differ in their support of Fibre Channel (FC) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) protocols, but they all feature support for one or the other, and some support both. In fact, the IBM DS4100 and DS4200 are the only DS4000 series SAN's that features solely SATA support. While they are unique in their 2 Gigabits per second (Gbps) SATA interface and support for up to 112 SATA disk drives, other DS4000 series SAN systems like the IBM DS4800 feature a 4Gbps FC interface as well as support for FC and/or SATA disk drives.

Highly Flexible SAN Systems That Can Be Custom-Fit to Unique Storage Requirements

There are many ways to configure an IBM System Storage DS4000 series SAN to fit unique storage requirements. One parameter is cache size, with the ability to scale from 512 Megabytes (MB) all the way up to 16 Gigabytes (GB) of physical cache memory, dependent on model. However, the focus of most storage solutions is disk storage capacity and your DS4000 SAN system, through model choices and scalability within models, using from 1 to 16 EXP100, EXP710 and EXP810 expansion enclosures, allows for a large degree of variation tailored to specific storage needs.