Storage Virtualize 8.6.0 Available

Over the last month it was great to catch up with some many customers, partners and IBMers as we hopped around Europe for the early summer User Group season. Even better was the weather, especially as its turning cold and damp here back in New Zealand!

The User Groups were taking the chance to also celebrate 20 years since we first released SVC, the grandfather of all Storwize and FlashSystem products. We definitely ate too much cake – see my Linked In for examples!

Meanwhile, on Friday, 8.6.0.0 was made available for download on FixCentral. 8.6.0 will be the next LTS release of “Storage” Virtualize – as you probably heard, IBM has renamed “Spectrum” to “Storage” – and we collected quite a bit of money in the swear jars over the last month as all speakers ended up saying Spectrum by mistake – habits are hard to break!

8.6.0 Summary

The 8.6.0 release contains the following new or enhanced feature set :

• Inline Data Corruption Detection – by calculating the Shannan Entropy of data streams, we can look for early warnings that data streams maybe under attack.
• SVC support for Safeguarded Copy on Stretched Cluster configurations. Not only can we now support SGC when using VDM, but also a 10x increase in the capacity that can be managed in an ESC (Enhanced Stretched Cluster)
• Multi-threaded iSCSI Kernel Module(s). The single kernel module driving all iSCSI connections/ports has been a bottleneck to unleashing iSCSI performance. No more! Some huge increases available, proportional to the number of cores in the box.
• NVMe-TCP Support. Adding to our existing iSCSI, iSER, RoCEv2 and iWarp support, we can now run any or all of these protocols including NVMe-TCP on one or more Ethernet ports. The choice is yours. We’ve also removed almost all of the ethernet card slot resitrictions so you can over subscribed the 100Gb ports for example to get more fan in.
• Security Improvements. Various service level commands that required superuser access have been moved into the main task and info commands to reduce the need to re-enable superuser – because you’ve all disabled superuser access – right?! TLS v1.3 is also now supported for all SSL connections.
• Cloud email accounts for call home. As it says, you can use cloud based email services for call home emails, including a simple “test” process to validate its all working!
• SV4PC – Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud – full currency with 8.6.0 features on both Azure and AWS instances.
• Scalability.
  • 1024 iSCSI/iSER hosts per IO Group (2x previous)
  • FlashSystem 9500 – support for 65K snapshots
  • Support for 40PB of snapshots on SVC SV3
  • Support for 20PB (volume capacity) of VDM on SVC SV3 (so 40PB mirrored capacity)

The 40PB is shared between snapshots and VDM, so 10PB is more realistic value for using SGC with ESC.

What do I get if I move from 8.5.0 to 8.6.0?

Given the new LTS and CD release strategy, not only do you get the features as listed above, but if you are sticking to LTS releases, you also get everything that was released in 8.5.1 through 8.5.4 … so :

I’m still currently recommending 8.5.0.8 as the place to be for most customers who want to remain reasonably current on an LTS, but it won’t be long before we start recommending 8.6.0, which as you can see brings you a raft of new features and enhancements.

Check out the upgrade planning support page for more details.