Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • The problems/joys/implications of more storage.

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 3rd November 2012 15,916 views on developerwortks Last week I had a couple of meetings in Manchester (UK) with some SVC and V7000 end users, as well as the chance to pop in and say hi to our team in the IBM Manchester labs. About two days before heading up the M6 I was asked if I’d like to join in a roundtable session with UKFast – discussing the cost of storage, how customers should think of what they are buying, and in general what can be done to help reduce not only capital expenditure, but more importantly… [Read More]

  • Configuring IBM Storwize and SVC for Optimal Performance – Part2

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 17th August 2012 TOP 5 POST – 77,440 views on developerworks Thanks to everyone who responded to my Part 1 post, I’m amazed at how many people must read what I have to say! Based on the number of you that have either spoken to me in person, or emailed. I’m glad to be of some use 🙂 Anyway, part one seems to have thrown up quite a discussion. At the end of the day, RAID and of course the cache layers can do its best to make the IO that hits the disks as optimal as possible.… [Read More]

    Configuring IBM Storwize and SVC for Optimal Performance – Part2

  • IBM to acquire TMS (Texas Memory Systems)

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 17th August 2012 13,795 views on developerworks As you may or may not have seen, IBM has agreed to acquire Texas Memory Systems :http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/38594.wss  This has many implications (all good) for SVC, Storwize V7000, and Pure Systems. Better integration with existing RamSan products, and of course integrated versions of these products moving forward. Watch out for more news soon, but with our work on the next generation SVC platforms well under way…. this is the tip of the iceberg 🙂 (Sorry for so little posts recently, I will get part2 of the optimising for perfomance series up by end… [Read More]

    IBM to acquire TMS (Texas Memory Systems)

  • FCoE, RTC and much much more…

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 14th June 2012 25,166 views on developerworks On Friday we will release SVC software version 6.4 – it used to be simple, I could just reference SVC, but of course the same software package can be installed on V7000 systems. At present V7000 Unified systems remain at 6.3 features and functions. You’ve probably seen the news in the press, and IBM RFA’s regarding 6.4 that was announce on the 4th June, but for many people, and those of you that have been to briefings, User Group sessions and general roadmap discussions, I can at last feel pride in… [Read More]

    FCoE, RTC and much much more…

  • V7000 (Gen1) SPC-1 Benchmark

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 14th June 2012 24,016 views on developerwortks. One of the key benefits of the Storwize V7000 product is its built in Virtiualization capabilites. Or as some vendors like to call it  Federation? Its been almost 9 years since we first released SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and in that time, its been through 6 hardware iterations, and 16 major software function enhancement releases. Its a testiment to the original architecture that we’ve added 6 new major functions (GM, SE, VDM, RAID, RTC, ET) to the stack, and the code now runs on 9 physically different hardware platforms – and… [Read More]

    V7000 (Gen1) SPC-1 Benchmark

  • Are you using FlashSystem storage behind SVC/Storwize in an EasyTier pool?

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 12th June 2015 Here’s a quick one that I was reminded of today… The EasyTier 3 feature was introduced in 7.3.0.0 and introduced a number of new EasyTier features, but a few of them relied on knowledge of the maximum throughput and IOPs capability for each managed disk. On Storwize RAID arrays, this was a fairly easy problem to solve.  We could measure the performance of individual drives and then calculate the managed disk’s capabilities because we know how many drives there are and what type of RAID we are using.  However for SAN attached managed disks we… [Read More]

  • SVC Standby Engine

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 6th July 2015 Hi again. I wanted to mention a feature that we released recently which we are calling the SVC Standby Engine.  Unfortunately this feature is not available for Storwize systems, so it’s probably not worth you reading this, but let me know if it’s the kind of feature you would want on a Storwize system.  That type of feedback is always valuable when prioritising future features. What is this Standby Engine Feature? This feature makes use of the existing non-disruptive hardware upgrade procedures to allow users to have a standby node which can be used to… [Read More]

  • What do we mean when we talk about Clustering on the Storwize Products

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 9th October 2015 There’s a particular business partner (I’ll be shocked if he isn’t the first person to comment on this post) who has asked for a “what is clustering” session at almost every one of the UK user groups for what seems like a couple of years now.  I really couldn’t see what I would talk about when answering this question – so I didn’t give it too much thought.  Even more confusing was the fact that this business partner is well known to us as someone who has a really good grasp on how the technology… [Read More]

  • Using EasyTier with Nearline Storage (and other ET tips)

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 22nd October 2015 Hi, As more and more of you start to use Nearline storage in your EasyTier pools, there are a couple of scenarios which I would like to describe to you to help you avoid some pitfalls. Migrating from a single tier pool to a multi-tier pool containing Nearline. So you have decided that EasyTier is the way to go for your business and after doing some analysis you’ve decided that you want to migrate to a 3 tier pool.  After all you have a lot of idle data in your environment, why store it on… [Read More]