About Disk Systems

The IBM System Storage DS4800 disk storage system supports a high-performance 4 Gbps Fibre Channel interface for increased host connectivity to deliver necessary bandwidth for high-throughput applications. It is designed for data-intensive applications that demand increased connectivity provided by eight 4 Gbps host channels designed to provide up to 1724 MBps of sustained bandwidth for high-throughput applications through the eight channels directly attached to the host servers or connected to a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN). Designed to help lower your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) The IBM System Storage DS4800 disk storage system offers customers a 4 Gbps SAN solution to take advantage of the performance offered by 4 Gbps technology. There are two ways to measure performance of an SAN device: Megabytes per second (MBps) and input/output per second (IOPS). The IBM DS4800 4 Gbps SAN product has very impressive performance numbers. It is designed to offer up to 1724 MBps throughput with up to 575,000 IOPS. A 2 Gbps storage array can require up to twice as many host ports as a 4 Gbps array to deliver the throughput of four 4 Gbps ports. This frees up ports in the SAN for each array. On the host side, if a server requires more than two 2 Gbps host bus adapters (HBAs) to attain the required performance (a server should have at least two HBAs for availability), then that number can be halved with 4 Gbps. Fewer HBAs help lower the number of switch ports used and can help reduce overall cost.