Fujitsu ETERNUS DX adds up to 50 per cent performance at no extra cost

To help to deal better with the peak loads of every-day enterprise and deliver the service-level agreements (SLAs) of business-critical applications, Fujitsu is offering a free-of-charge, easy-to-download enhancement for the ‘start small to high end’ ETERNUS DX8700 S2 system which can increase the performance up to 50 per cent and up to a total of one million Input/Output Operations per second (IOPS).

Fujitsu is committed to enabling customers of all sizes and pockets to benefit from flash-disk technology to support critical applications including business analytics, OLTP and big data. Now available across the ETERNUS DX product line, further innovations include the support of multi-level-cell Solid-state Drives (SSDs), plus new functionality in the ETERNUS SF 15.3 system management.

Pricing and availability
The new upgrades are available from July 2013, and can be implanted during system operation with no downtime required. The Fujitsu ETERNUS DX family of disk-based storage products is available globally and is sold via direct sales or Fujitsu Channel Partners. System prices vary depending on configuration.

Technical details
· Performance Upgrade for ETERNUS DX8700 S2 improves SLA’s of business critical applications With new and downloadable system enhancement customers can achieve an overall increase of performance between 25 per cent up to 50 per cent depending on block-size, volume type and RAID level. Tests showed that up to 1,000,000 IOPS can be achieved. A new optimized routing of the inter-controller data flow tremendously increases access times and response times enabling customers to serve higher peak loads at no extra costs. The new upgrades will be available as of end of July and can be implanted during operations without any system downtime.

· Availability of Solid-state Disk Drives in Multi-Level-Cell technology offers more performance at lower price for nearly all ETERNUS With the release of 400 GByte and 800GByte SSD’s with Multi-Level-Cell technology customers can benefit from flash-disk technology at a lower price level in order to support performance-critical applications like business analytics, large scales OLTP applications and big data.

· New features in ETERNUS SF storage management software drives efficiency of operations through increased automation
o The Automated Storage Tiering (AST) functionality can now set thresholds automatically based on best practices in balancing capacity and performance. An extensive set of parameters in terms of thresholds and quotas for capacity allocation can be defined to automatically maintain service level agreements. These improvements reduce the need for special skills and relieve the administrator from time consuming research and planning
o Application integration makes backup and restore an easy task Easy-to-use wizards are implemented with ETERNUS SF 15.3 which simplify backup and restore processes of Microsoft Exchange Server. Furthermore automated backup and restore of dedicated virtual machines help customers to reduce unplanned downtime of their virtual data centre environments.