IBM System Storage DS5020 review

Dynamic capacity expansion comes as standard and allows you to drop in more disks or expansion cabinets and add them on the fly to existing logical drives. Using the Add Free Capacity option you simply select an existing array and assign new drives to it. This canbe done without affecting normal operations.

To test raw performance using the high speed FC drives we hooked up a Broadberry CyberServe dual Xeon X5560 rack server to the array via its Brocade 8Gbps FC card and mapped a dedicated volume to it. Running Iometer configured with sixteen workers, a 64KB transfer request size and sixteen outstanding I/Os returned an impressive 649MB/sec raw sequential read throughput.

We then added an HP ProLiant DL360 G7 Xeon X5560 server also equipped with a Brocade 8Gbps FC card and mapped a dedicated volume to it as well. With Iometer running on both systems we saw a cumulative raw read throughput of 1290MB/sec. This shows that no contention for resources occurred.

We also tested IP SAN speeds over Gigabit by creating two dedicated logical volumes and mapping one to each of the two servers. With Iometer running on one target we saw a high raw read throughput of 113MB/sec. With both servers in the mix, cumulative performance settled at a very satisfying 223MB/sec.

Along with top performance over FC and IP SANs we were impressed with the DS5020 on a number of other counts. It’s extremely easy to deploy, offers high levels of redundancy plus a huge expansion potential and is good value too.