The DS4000 range is the midrange family of RAID boxes Big Blue OEMs from Engenio, competing primarily against the Clariion boxes from EMC and with serial ATA, SATA, drives.
This slower and cheaper drive technology is designed for capacity rather than out-and-out performance. It is particularly targeted at secondary, near-line RAID storage in tiered architectures holding data that while not required to be immediately available is still relevant enough that it cannot yet be put out for archival where it could go to tape.
The new device in the family is the DS4200 Express, which features up to 56TB of SATA storage and support for 4Gb Fibre Channel connectivity, replacing the previous low end of the series, the DS4100. No prices were available ahead of the announcement, but IBM did say it targets the SMB and enterprise workgroup space.
The new 500GB SATA drives IBM is introducing across the higher-end boxes in the family means that the top of the range, the DS4800, can scale up to 112TB of capacity, with the use of 16 EXP810 expansion units. The next array down, the DS4700, scales to 56TB, in which case six EXP810 units are required.
While the maximum capacities on these devices are not necessarily a lot bigger than the low-end arrays (the new DS4200 Express scales up to 56TB), they offer greater functionality. Both the DS4700 and DS4800 feature support for VMWare Infrastructure 3 server virtualization technology.
