It’s the fall, so it must mean it is time for IBM’s bi-annual update of its disk subsystems. Yesterday Big Blue made changes to its mainframe and open systems disk lines and started telling customers about future technology changes. IBM added a new peer- to-peer copy feature to its model 9393-T82 RAMAC Virtual Array (RVA) Turbo arrays for mainframes, a StorageTek product formerly known as Iceberg that IBM resells under the RAMAC name brand. The Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (PPRC) support allows a secondary RAMAC array separated by ESCON connections of up to 43 kilometers or 27 miles apart to provide hot backup for a primary array located in the data center without the host computer being involved in the copying. The feature can also be used to move data between different RVA data farms, for example copying data from a production system to a data warehouse.
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
This peer-to-peer function first appeared on IBM’s own 9390 RAMAC 3 Array and 3990 model 6 mainframe storage controllers and has the same look and feel on the RVA2. PPRC is implemented as a combination of hardware and microcode changes. IBM says that it expects many of the 4,000 RVAs in the field to be upgraded with PPRC, which costs $210,000, will be available December 4. PPRC is supported on OS/390, MVS, VM and VSE environments; it is also indirectly supported by IBM’s Cross-Platform Extension (XPE) technology, which allows high speed data transfers between RVAs and Unix and Windows NT servers. Concurrent with the PPRC announcement, IBM announced new configurations of the RVA. It has withdrawn the 80 and 210 gigabyte Iceberg models, which come with 1 gigabyte of cache memory (these are effective capacities, as Iceberg makes extensive use of data compression to stretch its hardware), and replaced them with Icebergs that come with two gigabytes of cache and anywhere from 500 to 840 gigabytes of storage. List prices for these new T82s range from $1.2 to $2.4 million — that’s between $2.50 and $2.86 per megabyte in a market where RVAs sell for $0.25 to $0.35 per megabyte, and where IBM is hot to trot, street prices are even less than that. IBM also talked briefly about forthcoming enhancements to the RVA. The company plans to quadruple the number of virtual 3390 drives that can be defined on the RVA to 1024. IBM will also add support for virtual 3390 model 9 disks on the RVA. IBM also plans to add faster CPUs in the RVA controller, but is not being specific about what it will add and how much power increases customers can expect. IBM will also boost the controller cache on the RVA to 6 gigabytes, up 4 gigabytes, to help speed up demanding workloads at its biggest mainframe customers.
US Census deal
Yesterday IBM was also celebrating the sale of an aggregate of 4 petabytes of SSA disks since it first announced its SSA arrays in mid-1995, with the US Census Bureau purchase of 7133 SSA arrays as part of its American Fact Finder web site. This is scheduled to be launched in early 1999 and will provide geographic, demographics and economic information about America. IBM took the occasion to announce new SSA disk subsystems using its own 18.2 gigabyte disk drives, which offer twice the capacity of the model 7133 arrays they replace. However, knowing that commercial customers want to avoid disk contention, it is still offering 4.5 and 9.1 gigabyte disks in the 7133 models D40 rack-mount and T40 tower arrays. The 7133-D40 and T40 arrays offer from 18 to 291 gigabytes of capacity in a single array; up to 1.75 terabytes can be packed into a single rack with the 18.2 gigabyte disks. The new SSA arrays include a new advanced SSA optical extended, similar to ESCON, that increases the distance the arrays can be away from the Unix and NT servers to which they are attached to 10 kilometers from 2.4 kilometers. The base 7133-D40/T40 costs $14,750; additional 18.2 gigabyte disks cost $4,900. Support for AIX 4.3 for the new 7133s will be available on November 13. Support for Sun servers using SBus cards comes on November 20, with support for AIX 4.1 as well as other Sun, HP and DEC servers coming on December 18 and for IBM’s Tarpon Versatile Storage Server coming on February 26, 1999. รก
