Systems Hardware

Data Sheet

IBM DS8900F
High-performance storage solutions for
mission-critical environments
Highlights More than 90% of enterprises around the world now operate
in hybrid cloud environments, and this is expected to grow to
• 18 μs response time for 95% in the following 18 months from now.1 At the same time,
mainframe environments many of the world’s leading industries rely on mainframes as
• Enterprise resiliency with the backbone of their IT and data processing infrastructure.
better than seven 9s Mainframes are a major driver of worldwide commerce,
availability including banking, airlines, credit card processing, and retail
• Seamless hybrid cloud operations.2
integration with
Transparent Cloud Tiering
• 3 and 4 site replication with
2 seconds RPO at more
than 1,000 miles
• Malware and ransomware
protection with IBM
Safeguarded Copy
• 100% data encryption, at-
rest, in-flight and in the
cloud
• Cloud-native
transformation with Red
Hat OpenShift and IBM
Cloud Paks
• Integration into IBM z15 IBM DS8900F Storage System
and LinuxONE III single
frame solutions
The IBM DS8900F family of data systems offers an ideal
solution for accelerating the dynamic hybrid cloud
environments that characterize 21st business. IBM DS8900F
brings proven, market-leading capabilities, with the
performance, security, data resilience, and cost-efficiency
needed to handle mission-critical and mainframe-driven
business application workloads.
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Data Sheet

Mission-critical capabilities

IBM DS8900F data systems are designed to accelerate IBM Z, LinuxONE and IBM Power
Systems as well as data-intensive workloads in open environments. Built with the most
advanced processor technology, IBM DS8900F delivers next level performance, data resilience
and enterprise availability to build faster, more efficient operations and make smarter decisions
to transform data into business opportunities.

The DS8900F family includes four flexible models designed to address a wide variety of
workloads and different business needs:

IBM DS8910F model 993 is designed for medium-sized organizations looking for powerful
enterprise capabilities delivered in a flexible, rack-mountable solution at the lowest entry
cost. This solution can be integrated into IBM z15 model T02, IBM LinuxONE III model LT2, or
customer provided 19-inch industry standard racks.

IBM DS8910F model 994 is designed for midrange organizations looking to meet storage
challenges with advanced functionality offered in a prepackaged 40U 19-inch industry standard
rack.

IBM DS8950F model 996 provides better performance and higher capacity, enabling the
consolidation of mission-critical workloads for IBM Z, IBM LinuxONE, IBM Power Systems, and
open environments under a single enterprise storage solution.

IBM DS8980F model 998 delivers the best performance to help customers process transactions
faster, while allowing them to expand their workload possibilities to AI and Business
intelligence.

All four IBM DS8900F offerings provide the following benefits:

The fastest application response time for mainframe environments, with latencies as low as 18
μs.

Better than 99.99999 (“seven nines”) availability and no-data-loss automatic failover within
metropolitan distances.

The fastest disaster recovery solution for mainframe, with 2 seconds RPO and less than 60
seconds RTO at more than 1,000 miles. 3

Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT) to enable hybrid cloud storage solutions as additional tiers for
disaster recovery, data archiving and long-term retention in IBM Z environments.

Encryption of data at-rest, in-flight and when it is transmitted to the cloud without any impact on
performance.
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Data Sheet

IBM Safeguarded Copy functionality to protected data from malware, ransomware, and many
other adverse cyber events.

Persistent storage for mission-critical containers with support for IBM Cloud Pak™ solutions to
enhance and extend the functionality of Red Hat® OpenShift®.

On-going innovation

The IBM DS8900F family is the perfect storage foundation for consolidating transactional, cloud
native, and AI workloads under a single all flash mission-critical solution, delivering the
following benefits to customers as compared to the previous generation:

Up to 25% reduction in response time for mainframe and 16% reduction in response time for
Open Systems to process transactions faster, while expanding workloads to AI, Analytics and
Business Intelligence.

2.15x more system cache to improve the potential for cache hit rate and delivering faster
background operations.

10x availability improvement to maximize systems uptime with an average of only 3 seconds
downtime in a year. From six (99.9999) to seven nines (99.99999) of availability.

2x greater bandwidth capacity for the establish Metro Mirror pair function with 32 GFC host
adapters.

19% less weight and 5% less energy consumption improving environmentals while obtaining
savings in maintenance and operating costs.

Data security is another area of enhancement within the IBM DS8900F family. Now, SP
800-131A compliant encryption can be extended to data in flight between IBM DS8900F arrays
and all individual VTL systems in a TS7770 grid. And because there’s no need to configure key
groups, key managers, or other configurable items, encryption is now even easier within
DS8900F / TS7770 environments. In addition, the IBM DS8900F family now has the option of a
local key manager to enable and manage encryption at rest, protecting data and reducing
complexity while keeping expenses and operation costs low.

Ultra-low application response times

In addition to an architecture optimized for high-performance flash storage media, IBM

DS8900F solutions also offer extremely fast data access enabled by technologies such as IBM
zHyperLink – the result of an IBM research project created to provide ultra-low latency links
between mainframe servers and storage systems. IBM zHyperLink dramatically accelerates
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Data Sheet

access to data with less than 18 μs response time and can be integrated with IBM HyperSwap to
meet the needs of high performance in high availability environments.

IBM DS8900F provides consistent performance for read operations in high availability
environments for metropolitan regions, reducing the negative impact of increased latency
caused by the separation distance between storage systems. This capability enables reads from
a secondary site both over FICON and zHyperLink to obtain the same response time as the
primary system and better workload balance.

Powerful cyber resilience

The IBM DS8000 family is the leader in the external storage market for mainframe
environments;4 these proven data systems have been deployed in business-critical
environments for more than two decades, this is the reason why 18 of the top 20 banks
worldwide use IBM DS8000 storage solutions.5

IBM DS8900F is designed to manage the full spectrum of storage workloads that exist in today’s
dynamic business environments and do it while offering very high performance and system
availability, with industry-leading data protection and disaster recovery features. An important
security feature offered by DS8900F is its comprehensive support for the IBM Z suite of data
protection technologies collectively labeled pervasive encryption. These technologies enable
extensive encryption of data in-flight and at-rest to substantially simplify encryption and reduce
costs associated with protecting data.

The unrelenting tide of data breaches is driving increased interest in secure authentication
across hybrid cloud environments. IBM provides a unique technology that ensures data is
accessed only by authorized server and storage devices in order to reduce and eliminate insider
threats of unauthorized access to the Storage Area Network. IBM Fibre Channel Endpoint
Security is an end-to-end solution which ensures all data flowing on FICON and Fibre Channel
Protocol (FCP) links from IBM Z to IBM DS8900F systems is encrypted. This solution provides
in-flight protection for all data, independent of the operating system or access method in use.

IBM DS8900F also offers the powerful data security functionality of IBM Safeguarded Copy. This
technology provides immutable points of data recovery that are hidden and protected from
being modified or deleted. These immutable copies are a trusted and secure source of data that
can be used for forensic analyses or surgical or catastrophic recoveries. For increased security,
Safeguarded Copy provides dual management control and can be integrated with different
disaster recovery and high availability configurations.

In order to extend cyber resilience even further, IBM DS8900F can now back up full data
volumes to the cloud where they can later be used to repair or recover production environments
that have been compromised by user errors, malicious destruction, or ransomware attacks. This
functionality leverages the benefits of TCT, including AES 256-bit encryption.
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Business continuity made simple

In combination with IBM DS8900F, IBM Copy Services Manager (CSM) helps simplify and
automate complex data replication tasks to be executed in just one step while providing high
availability capabilities under a single point of control.

IBM Copy Services Manager supports FlashCopy, Safeguarded Copy, and advanced disaster
recovery functions with failover and failback operations across two, three, and four
sites ensuring business continuity with extraordinary simplicity.

IBM Copy Service Manager

Seamless hybrid cloud integration

IBM Storage supports business transformation into a hybrid cloud ecosystem through a series of
innovations centered around Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, IBM Cloud Pak, and IBM
Storage Suite for Cloud Paks.

IBM has developed a series of middleware tools called IBM Cloud Paks designed to enhance
and extend the functionality and capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift. The family of IBM Cloud Pak
solutions give enterprises the fully modular and easy-to-consume capabilities they need to bring
their workloads into modern, cloud-based environments.

IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks is the software-defined storage infrastructure supporting IBM
Cloud Paks. These solutions are designed to give enterprises an open, faster, and more secure
way to move core business applications to the cloud. They also bring workloads to production by
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Data Sheet

seamlessly leveraging Kubernetes as the management framework, supporting production-level

qualities of service and end-to-end lifecycle management. In addition, IBM DS8900F provides
persistent storage for mission-critical containers with support for Container Storage Interface
(CSI), making data always available to the application, regardless of container location, planned
downtime or unexpected disruptions.

IBM DS8900F data systems provide Transparent Cloud Tiering capabilities that allow
organizations to introduce hybrid cloud as a new storage tier for data archiving, long term
retention, and data protection in IBM Z environments. TCT does not require a server or gateway;
it is a software-defined storage feature that leverages existing storage resources, avoiding the
need for additional hardware infrastructure. TCT integrates with IBM Cloud Object Storage and
can also provide transparent connectivity to IBM Cloud, Amazon S3 cloud storage resources,
RStor or IBM TS7700 virtual tape libraries configured as object storage targets.

TCT off-loads the data movement responsibility to the IBM DS8900F without any impact on
performance. Thanks to deep integration with z/OS, TCT provides up to 50% savings in
mainframe CPU utilization when migrating large data sets as compared to other traditional
archiving methods. TCT offers an excellent solution for increasing cyber resilience by making
use of the immutability features provided by cloud repositories. It can also be used to create full
volume backups to the cloud which can then be restored to any system.

AI-driven management and proactive support

As any storage administrator knows, managing large storage systems requires many hours of
monitoring, analysis, decision-making and adjustment. When problems arise, troubleshooting
complex storage infrastructure and implementing the most effective solutions can be
problematic, to say the least. To address these challenges and reduce both manual labor and
mistakes, IBM DS8900F comes with Storage Insights, an enterprise-proven, AI, cloud-based
system insights platform to help you better understand trends in storage capacity and
performance and expedite resolution when support is required.

Storage Insights monitors the health, capacity and performance under management on a single
pane of glass, helping IBM customers understand and plan storage capacity and
performance. The program provides proactive best practices and uses AI-based analytics to
help identify potential issues before they become problems. When support is needed, Storage
Insights helps speed resolution by simplifying opening tickets, automating log uploads to IBM,
and providing configuration, capacity and performance information to IBM technicians.

1
The Shift to Cloud Computing Persists as Organizations Use Multiple Public Clouds, IDG, June
2020
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Data Sheet

2
ESG White Paper: Enhancing Cyber Resilience in IBM Z Environments, August 2020
3
2 seconds RPO and less than 60 seconds RTO in replication environments configured
with Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) Continuous Availability
4
Based on DS8000 data system history and common use cases and IBM experience in real
customer environments using high availability features to improve security and resiliency
5
Based on rankings documented by S&P Global Market Intelligence: The World's 100 Largest
Banks 2020, April 2020

IBM DS8900F at a glance

IBM DS8900F data systems bring the security, performance, and cloud functionality demanded
in today’s data-intensive hybrid cloud environments. Build with flexibility, deliver with
confidence, and protect the future of your business with these solutions from IBM Storage.

Table of Specifications

For details on supported servers, visit the IBM System Storage

Interoperation Center (SSIC)
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Data Sheet

Why IBM? For more information

Whatever the requirements, only IBM can To learn more about IBM DS8900F, please
help with end-to-end solutions that include contact your IBM representative or IBM
data systems, application servers, software, Business Partner, or
services, support and equipment financing. visit: ibm.com/products/ds8000f
The IBM DS8900F data systems deliver
mission-critical availability, superior flash For information on specific function
performance, unparalleled synergy with IBM availability, please contact your IBM storage
servers and leading-edge hybrid multicloud specialist.
capabilities for organizations looking to
achieve a true competitive advantage.
Systems Hardware
Data Sheet

This document contains information pertaining to the

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