ORIGINALLY POSTED 17th November 2007

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Today we are have made available IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) Version 4.2.1 with more function than previously announced, including new VMware support, and also announced that IBM has passed an historic milestone by shipping its 10,000th SVC node.

A press release issued today (see the original IBM press release in the IBM Press Room) describes how IBM has shipped the 10,000th SVC node to Able Body Labor, a mid-sized business in Florida. This 10,000th SVC node is now part of the more than 3,400 SVC clusters that are running with customers world-wide. With this many systems, IBM is the clear leader in storage virtualization compared with EMC (who claim only 200 customers for Invista system) and Hitachi (who claim to have sold 6000 Tagmastore/USP systems but reportedly only 10% are actually using their virtualization capability at any time and then primarily just for data migration)^1.

A new SVC case study with a fully virtualized server/storage environment highlights these advantages: “SVC has made a big difference to the scalability and cost-effectiveness of our storage environment,” says Luke Lau, Director of IT Technology Planning at Agrium. “By treating all our storage devices as a single pool, it has become much easier to manage the infrastructure. If we need more space, we simply plug in more hardware and SVC treats it as part of the SAN with minimal need to change settings or reconfigure.”

SVC 4.2.1, generally available today, includes important new functions that help our customers create disk-to-disk copies of their data for backup and other purposes and also dramatically expands previous SVC configuration limits as described in my last few SVC posts.

Finally, SVC now supports Red Hat and SUSE Linux and Netware operating systems running under VMware ESX Server when using Qlogic HBAs. The specific releases are documented on the SVC Interoperability web site. RPQs are no longer required for configurations running supported levels of Windows or these operating systems with VMware ESX Server 3.0.2 and when supported QLogic HBAs are being used. RPQs are still required for other operating systems or different HBAs.

These enhancements are available at no additional charge for existing SVC customers, all of whom –even those using our oldest hardware– can upgrade to this new version.

¹ Hitachi data taken from :http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=AD8B10FD-A434-4AE4-BCF6-F0E6FBA98FFC
EMC data from EMC sourced article discussing Invista Release2 – link not to hand.