ORIGINALLY POSTED 24th April 2009

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I’ve been head down for the last few weeks, getting a chance to enhance a chunk of code in the middle of the SVC code stack for the next release, the cache. SVC caching is based on an LRU (Least Recently Used) cache model with partitioning added to make things cope with differing capabilities of the attached storage controllers. Look to any such ‘heterogeneous’ storage virtualizer to provide similar capabilities. Global caching is great for a monolith, but in a a truly virtualized solution you need to be sure that a slow, overloaded controller isn’t going to affect your tier 0 business critical storage. Anyway I’ve been simplifying and tweaking, tuning and balancing for the last few weeks. As a developer at heart, when you get into something like that it becomes all consuming – well it does for me anyway 🙂

I did managed (was forced) to have a week off over the Easter break and completely switched the brain off for some ten days or so, ploughing into some long needed DIY on the home front. During which time, EMC announced their DMX-5 ‘modular monolith’. The spin-doctors at EMC marketing have been working overtime, since the failed, scrapped, no longer sold, (you choose) Invista, they must have jumped for joy when 5 means V in roman numerals, and of course meant they could use the Virtualization buzz word – but nobody is really fooled – right? Spin spin spin…

Anyway, in these difficult times, its good to see that more and more existing and future customers are seeing the value in what is true modular, virtual storage where you have the flexibility to move from that last generation, power hungry infrastructure to a more modern system without downtime or disruption, and should you need more storage of any tier, simply add it where you need and start using it – no need for expensive expansion units for your monolith – modular or not.

One such customer, the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore have done just that, you can read the details in [link dead] I’ve never been further East than Greece, but if I do this looks like a stunning place to stay. Their experience with IBM can be yours, switch from HP and we can save you power and money, make migrations easy, and above all, in your SAN we can provide the only real modular virtualization solution. Don’t be fooled by the spin, there is only one truly modular solution, SVC.