STORAGE

IBM announced that its storage virtualization product, the IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller and one of its enterprise disk subsystem storage products, the IBM TotalStorage DS8300, have achieved top scores for performance as measured by the Storage Performance Council's latest benchmark. The Storage Performance Council's newly released industry storage benchmark SPC-2 is the second SPC benchmark result published in the last six weeks to highlight IBM's storage performance leadership. The SPC-2 benchmark consists of three application-oriented sequential I/O performance tests, which include large file processing, large database queries and video on demand. The IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller demonstrated the best sequential throughput producing an average of 3,517 SPC-2 MBPS (megabytes per second). Additionally the IBM TotalStorage DS8300 followed closely behind, garnering the number two overall score in the test with a submitted result of 3,217 SPC-2 MBPS. The DS8300 was the top performer among tested enterprise disk storage subsystems. "Over and over again, IBM has proven its support of open and objective performance testing, and in the process has demonstrated clear performance leadership," said Kristie Bell, vice president, marketing, IBM Storage. "This latest achievement reaffirms IBM's SAN Volume Controller as a world leading virtualization platform and IBM's DS8000 series as a world leading disk storage platform for large-scale workload applications and performance. We continue to offer our clients storage solutions that are designed to optimize their infrastructure investments and deliver information on demand. These results deepen our conviction that innovation truly matters." The IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller, launched more than two years ago and installed in more than 1,500 businesses worldwide, continues to help reduce the cost and complexity of managing SAN-based storage to clients in many industries across the globe. Now on its eighth release, the SAN Volume Controller is being used by customers worldwide including First Merit Bank, Marine Max and City of Richmond in Virginia. The DS8000 series products feature three IBM Research-developed software innovations in caching that are designed to work together to deliver dramatically greater throughput and faster response times for a wide range of real-life workloads. A new prefetching feature preloads and manages sequential data in the cache so it always contains the needed data. This prefetching feature also enhances the previously announced Adaptive Replacement Cache technology that integrates and balances both of the critical caching and prefetching functions. The third innovation is designed to eliminate undesirable interactions between the read- and write-cache management while still allowing both caches to beneficially share memory resources. The IBM TotalStorage DS8000 Series is used by customers around the world. Some recent customers using the breakthrough disk system include Memorial Health System in the United States, Crédit Immobilier in France and Schwenk Zement KG in Germany. The high-performance, high-capacity TotalStorage DS8000 Series exploits IBM POWER5 and Virtualization Engine technology to set a new standard in enterprise storage. "IBM is to be congratulated on being an early adopter and producer of two significant SPC-2 results," said Walter E. Baker, Administrator and Auditor for the Storage Performance Council. "The new SPC-2 benchmark provides an additional view of storage performance for customers seeking to assess performance based upon objective, verified benchmark results. A combination of SPC-1 and SPC-2 results provides a comprehensive view of the random and sequential I/O performance of storage products such as IBM's SAN Volume Controller and DS8300." SPC-2 was unveiled in December of 2005 as the next phase of performance benchmarks for the storage industry. SPC-2 benchmark results were released for a wide range of storage products. Each SPC-2 result has been both audited and peer reviewed for compliance to ensure consistency and accuracy. The SPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define, standardize and promote storage system benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable performance data to the computer industry and its customers. SPC membership is open to all companies, academic institutions and individuals. The SPC created the first industry-standard performance benchmark in 2001, targeted at the needs and concerns of the storage industry and its goal is to serve as a catalyst for performance improvement in storage. For a complete list of SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmark results, visit its Web site.