IBM has enhanced its information infrastructure portfolio of high-end enterprise storage products designed to help businesses manage the explosive growth in data and information. The enhancements to the IBM System Storage DS8000 and the XIV storage system include better performance, security, manageability and business continuity that will help customers reduce costs and energy consumption, while dealing with the increasing volume of information that needs to be stored, managed and analyzed.

IBM announced that the XIV Storage System, a high-end disk storage architecture designed to eliminate the complexity of administration and management of tiered storage, will support asynchronous mirroring later this year. This will enable remote site disaster recovery without a limit on distance and without impacting response time, helping customers protect information from local outages and ensuring the continuing availability of critical information. For example, a hospital using the XIV storage system would be able to continuously mirror medical test results to a site thousands of miles away, enabling medical professionals to access patient information at all times.

Additional XIV enhancements include better performance through the introduction of dual processors, offering performance improvements of up to 30 percent. This will help customers reduce costs by ensuring the efficiency of employees who rely on quick access to information. Other XIV enhancements include new functionality to support Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), enabling single sign-on and consolidated access control for multiple systems, as well as IBM Tivoli Productivity Center 4.1 support designed to simplify cross-systems management.

IBM also announced the addition of Thin Provisioning to the IBM System Storage DS8000, which supports continuous operations for cross-platform, mission-critical workloads. Thin provisioning capabilities are instrumental in allowing companies to more effectively store and access tremendous amounts of information across their organizations. It increases storage capacity utilization with no loss in performance, which helps businesses maintain service levels and reduce both acquisition and operational costs by maximizing use of their existing storage infrastructures. Thin Provisioning also simplifies disk capacity management by automating the provisioning process, which requires minimal administrative oversight.

“Businesses today are faced with addressing core information requirements around compliance, availability, retention and security, while also maximizing the value in their current storage infrastructure,” said Barry Rudolph, Vice President, IBM System Storage. “IBM’s broad portfolio of storage offerings will help customers unlock the value in their data centers to address their information infrastructure needs.”