IBM Delivers First Integrated Solid State Drive Support

IBM announced that its storage virtualization offering, the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), “is now faster, more scalable, and delivers the industry’s first integrated Solid State Drive support.”

SVC is a storage virtualization system that complements server virtualization technologies and enables a single point of control for storage resources (both IBM and non-IBM arrays) to support “improved business application availability, better IT infrastructure flexibility, and greater resource utilization.”

Building on IBM’s Quicksilver technology, IBM is introducing SVC 5.0, which now supports Solid State Drives (SSDs).

The tight integration of SSDs with SVC enables to take advantage of the high throughput capabilities of solid state by delivering up to 800,000 operations per second, and with response times of approximately one millisecond, nearly one-tenth of traditional disk storage.

SVC support of SSDs is highly flexible with a minimum configuration of only one SSD, helping make the technology more affordable yet scalable without disruption to enterprise requirements, as the company claims.

According to IBM, additional enhancements to SVC include 8Gbps Fibre Channel support, enabling higher throughout across Storage Area Networks, a tripling of the maximum cache to 24GB per engine, and support for consolidated DR configurations, enhancing SVCs business continuity capabilities.

SVC also supports attachment to servers using iSCSI protocols over IP networks, which can help reduce costs and simplify server configuration.

SAN Volume Controller 5.0 will be available November 6, with a US starting list price of $40,000.