ORIGINALLY POSTED 2nd April 2015

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First trip in new role has been to Christchurch for the last couple of days. Some good meetings with Business Partners to see the lay of the land here, and look over some interesting prospects being worked on.

The recent FlashSystem V9000 announcement, which I didn’t cover in my absence during the move process has been creating a lot of interest amoungst our existing and new customers. For those of you that haven’t heard about it, the FlashSystem 840 was available as the V840 which in itself provided the SVC functionality as heads attached to the 840 to give all the benefits of SVC virtualization, Replication, Snapshot and Compression. Now with the V9000 (based on the updated FlashSystem 900) we have integrated the management aspects of the FlashSystem into a single unified management interface.

This means the SVC user interface manages the flash as enclosures, just as you would on a Storwize product, and removes some of the configuration necessary to create an optimal performance setup on the underlying flash modules. One key thing here is that we made some changes to the backend layers in the virtualization stack that means we can now get maximal performance with only one mdisk created from the flash capacity. However please note that this change to the backend layer only applies when you have a V9000 solution, i.e. its detects the VPD information, knows its a V9000 and changes the behaviour. This DOES NOT apply if you attach an FS900 behind a standard SVC cluster,.

Anyway, been a good couple of days down here, and I know the earthquake was bad, but until you see for yourself how much construction is going on, and how much was damaged that you understand just how bad it must have been. I do hope they can find the funds to restore the cathedral to its former glory.