Lenovo ThinkSystem DM5200H

Introduction

The Lenovo ThinkSystem DM5200H Unified Storage Array is a hybrid flash unified storage system, designed to provide performance, simplicity, capacity, security, and high availability for medium-sized enterprises. Powered by the ONTAP storage management software, the DM5200H delivers enterprise-class storage management capabilities with a wide choice of host connectivity options and enhanced data storage solutions. The DM5200H is a perfect fit for a wide range of enterprise workloads, including artificial intelligence, archive / backup, big data and analytics, Compliance Data, Databases, Data Consolidation, File Shares, engineering and design, enterprise applications, and other storage I/O-intensive applications.

The ThinkSystem DM5200H model is a 2U rack-mountable enclosure that includes two controllers, with 128 GB of RAM (64GB per controller), 2 10/100/1000 Mb management ports ( 1 per controller), 2 RS-232 ports with an RJ45 interface ( 1 per controller), and 2x 2TB Flash Cache drives. Each controller provides adapter support for 10/25 GbE, 40/100 GbE, 12G SAS, or 16/32/64Gb Fibre Channel (FC) ports for host connectivity, depending on configuration.

A single ThinkSystem DM5200H Storage Array scales up to 480 total drives with support for up to 480 NLSAS drives with the attachment of DM600S 4U60 LFF or DM120S 2U12 LFF expansion enclosures and up to 120 SSD drives with the DM240S 2U24 expansion enclosure. The DM5200H supports up to 144 TiB of Flash Pool without Flash Cache and up to 140 TiB with Flash Cache.

Key features

The ThinkSystem DM5200H offers the following key features and benefits

• Available as a Unified storage platform - allowing NAS, SAN, and Object workloads.
• All systems are available with either the Essentials or Complete software feature offerings which provide feature flexibility.
• Compact NVMe Flash storage system delivering high-performance and low-latency at an affordable price point, enabling customers of all sizes to enhance their analytics and AI deployments and accelerate applications’ access to data.
• Hybrid-flash array capabilities with mixed SSD and NLSAS to meet the demands of high speed storage and high capacity in a single system.
• Support for NVMe SSDs in the controller enclosure
• Hybrid-flash storage with dual active/active controller configurations for high availability and performance.
• A rich set of storage management functions available, including snapshots, volume cloning, quality of service, thin provisioning, compression, deduplication, encryption, disk-based backup, application- and virtual machine-aware backup, quick data recovery, clustering, synchronous replication, and asynchronous replication.
• Improved performance and data protection with RAID-DP and RAID-TEC, as well as support for traditional RAID 4.
• Flexible host connectivity to match diverse client needs with support for unified NAS, SAN, and object storage protocols, including 10/25 Gbe and 40/100 GbE NAS, iSCSI, and NVMe/TCP 16/32/64 Fibre Channel connectivity, and 64 Gb NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe/FC).
• SAS drive-side connectivity with multipathing with 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) drives in the expansion enclosure. Supported expansions are: 40x DM120S (7D7X), 5x DM240S (7D7Y), 8x DM600S (7D7Z).
• Intuitive, web-based GUI for easy system setup and management.
• Lenovo XClarity support for centralized systems management of Lenovo x86 servers, switches, and storage, which provides automated agent-less discovery, inventory, monitoring, and additional platform-specific functions across multiple systems.
• Designed for 99.9999% availability with redundant hot-swap components, including controllers and I/O modules, power supplies, and non-disruptive firmware upgrades.

The DM5200H requires 2 flash cache drives and supports 6-22 additional NVMe drives for a performance tier or caching.. An expansion shelf is required. All expansion enclosure drives are dual-port and hot-swappable. Base units support attachment of either DM120S, DM240S or DM600S expansion enclosures and drives are designed to be added dynamically, which helps to quickly and seamlessly respond to ever-growing capacity demands.

The base units offer high levels of system and data availability with the following features:

• Dual-active controllers (high availability pair) with automatic load balancing and failover
• Mirrored, battery-backed controller NVMEM (8 GB per controller)
• Dual-port SSDs with automatic drive failure detection and rebuild
• Redundant, hot-swappable and customer replaceable hardware components, including transceivers, controllers, I/O modules, power supplies, and drives
• Automated failover for the data path between the host and the drives with multipathing
• Non-disruptive controller and drive firmware upgrades
• Scale-out clustering
• Persistent write log; NVlog written to flash if unplanned power loss occurs
• MCC IP