The Lenovo® Storage S3200 (shown in the following figure) is a versatile storage system that is designed to provide simplicity, speed, scalability, security, and high availability for small to large businesses. The S3200 SAN array delivers enterprise-class storage management technology in a cost-effective solution with a wide choice of host connectivity options, flexible drive configurations, and enhanced data management features.

The S3200 is a perfect fit for for a wide range of workloads, from specialized workloads such as big data and analytics, video surveillance, media streaming, and private clouds to general purpose workloads such as file and print serving, web serving, e-mail and collaboration, and OLTP databases. The S3200 is also suited very well for secure archive storage or a consolidated backup solution.

Figure 1. Lenovo Storage S3200

The S3200 offers the flexible choice of storage connectivity protocols: 6/12 Gb SAS, 1 Gb or 10 Gb iSCSI, and 4/8/16 Gb Fibre Channel (FC). Converged Network Controller (CNC) design of the S3200 makes the selection of iSCSI or FC host connectivity (or both FC and iSCSI) as simple as attaching corresponding transceivers or 10 GbE SFP+ Direct-Attach Copper (DAC) cables to the SFP/SFP+ ports on the RAID controller.

The S3200 supports up to 192 drives with up to seven external expansion enclosures, and it offers flexible drive configurations with the choice of 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drive form factors, 10K or 15K rpm SAS and 7.2K rpm NL SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) and self-encrypting drives (SEDs), and SAS solid-state drives (SSDs). The S3200 can be scaled up to 960 TB of raw storage capacity.

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The S3200 supports Intelligent Real-time Tiering capabilities that help optimize system performance, reduce costs, and simplify management. The base software includes the ability to move data dynamically between SAS HDDs that are optimized for cost per IOPS and NL SAS HDDs that are optimized for cost per GB. With the optional software license, the S3200 supports hybrid tiering across HDDs and SSDs.

With flexibility of the Converged Network Controllers, the S3200 supports hybrid iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity at the same time.

The S3200 supports battery-free cache protection which reduces maintenance costs and provides permanent backup of unwritten cache data in case of power failure.

Key features

Key features and benefits provided by the S3200 storage system include:

• Versatile, scalable storage with a single controller, or dual active/active controller configurations for high availability and performance.
• Flexible host connectivity to match diverse client needs with support for 6/12 Gb SAS (SAS controller) or 1/10 Gb iSCSI or 4/8/16 Gb FC connectivity (FC and iSCSI controller) or both iSCSI and FC at the same time.
• 6 Gb SAS drive-side connectivity with support for 12x 3.5-inch large form factor (LFF) or 24x 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) drives in the controller enclosure; scalable up to 96 LFF drives per system with the attachment of Lenovo Storage E1012 expansion enclosure (12x LFF drives each) or up to 192 SFF drives per system with the attachment of Lenovo Storage E1024 expansion enclosure (24x SFF drives each) to satisfy growing needs for storage capacity and performance.
• Flexibility in storing data on high performance SAS SSDs, performance-optimized enterprise SAS HDDs, or capacity-optimized enterprise NL SAS HDDs; mixing and matching drive types and form factors within a single system to perfectly meet performance and capacity requirements for various workloads.
• Support for self-encrypting drives to allow clients to secure their sensitive data and to comply with various security regulations when required.
• Rich set of standard functions available at no additional cost, including virtualized storage pools, snapshots, thin provisioning, rapid rebuild, real-time HDD tiering, and SSD read cache.
• Optional licensed functions, including higher number of snapshots for more scalability, real-time SSD tiering for boosting IOPS performance, and asynchronous replication for 24x7 data protection and disaster recovery.
• Intuitive, web-based GUI for easy system setup and management.
• Designed to comply with NEBS and MIL-STD requirements.
• Designed for 99.999% availability.