ORIGINALLY POSTED 9th May 2011

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 As hinted by my last post, the next release of SVC software is on its way, available in early June, along with the new optional 10Gbit iSCSI support.

Since SVC, and V7000 are essentially the same thing, just packaged in different hardware vehicles, all of the software updates apply to both products.

At a high level version 6.2 of the software contains :

• Clustering support for two V7000 control enclosures – hence 480 drives or 480TB raw capacity
• VMware VAAI support – for the currently available VMware APIs
• Real-time performance statistics in the new GUI and CLI
• Support for the optional 10Gbit iSCSI feature
  
• FlashCopy (TM) target devices can be Replication (GM/MM) source volumes
• Support for Gen3 SLC SSD in CF8 and new CG8 nodes – using RAID for redundancy rather than VDM
  
• VMware vCenter plug-in

The clustering support for V7000 further enhances the idea of “start small, grow large” without having to rip and replace (unlike some other vendors) where you have to upgrade the control hardware to scale out the number of disks, here you can start with one enclosure and grow to 20 as your business grows. Note that as this is SVC clustering, current support is 8 nodes, or 4 IO groups, so the current 480 drive (or 4 node) V7000 can be extended further. If you need to scale your V7000 installation beyond 480 drive, or 20 enclosure system, please submit an RPQ/SCORE request (which will be approved!) Needless to say, the V7000 performance scales linearly as you add more control enclosures and drives. Infact I even ran a test where all vdisks were mapped through just one control enclosure, and the performance still scales. The V7000 is roughly 50% saturated with a normal 240 drive system, so this shows you don’t need to be rigid about where you configure arrays, vdisks etc – further simplifying array and volume provisioning.

For SVC, the next generation node hardware, the CG8 will be available. This is a minor speed bump from the Xeon 5500 series to the 5600 series, to pickup the latest X3550M3 base server, and the ability to scale processor core to 6 and beyond in the future. The cache remains at 24GB, and performance is comparable to the CF8 nodes.

The GUi has been enhanced to allow you to view all 20 enclosures while maintaining the renowned ease of use, not to mention the new page that I hinted at last week :

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