Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • Thin Provisioning – what should you think about from an operational point of view

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 27th May 2015 Thin provisioning is a well understood technology in the storage industry, but a surprising number of you haven’t actually deployed it yet due to the “what-ifs” that keep you up at night.  In this post I will hopefully give you a pointer to my thoughts about how you could address [Read More]

  • Can you do Encryption as well as Compression

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 10th February 2016 Hi All, I got this question from a customer and thought it was worth a discussion. The short answer is yes you can perform both compression and encryption on data – as long as you do the steps in the correct order. The problem is that encrypted data is basically [Read More]

  • Some details about how DRAID works

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 17th March 2016 Hi, There have been a number of DRAID questions on the forums recently, so we thought it was worth giving you some extra details about the benefits of DRAID. Ian Boden has provided the following information, and if you ask nicely he may come back and give us some more [Read More]

  • RAID 5 Versus RAID 6

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 13th June 2016 Hi All, I was at the US user group last week – and this topic came up quite a lot.  The main reason that we started discussing R5 versus R6 is because the development team are currently recommending that all Distributed RAID arrays be configured as R6, and people are [Read More]

  • Performance optmization of Snapshots

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 15th June 2016 Hi All, I’ve been working with a customer and we’ve realised that our best practice for snapshots (or Thin provisioned FlashCopies with a background copy rate of zero) may have been slightly flawed.   There is no functional impact to these changes- but we can make some small changes that will [Read More]

  • DRAID 6 is the answer – what was the question

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 10th May 2017 Hi everyone, The last couple of days have been the UK user group again, and these interesting discussions always give me a number of new topics to talk about on the blog.  The best quote from the User Group can be attributed to @barrywhyteibm “No matter what the question – [Read More]

  • How to script on Spectrum Virtualize – tips and tricks

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 11th November 2017 Hi everyone, I have been asked to write up some hints and tips about how to do scripting on SVC / Storwize / Spectrum Virtualize.  I do a lot of scripting against our products – sometimes scripts that get published on developerworks (e.g. the Standby Node Script) and sometimes smaller [Read More]

  • Enhancements for nearline tiers in your multi-tier storage pool

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 31 May 2017 Hi again, With the User Group and IBM TechU this month I have a load of Blog posts that I’ve said I’ll write – so you might see them coming a bit fast this month. There is a new EasyTier feature that we released in 780 called “Warm Promote”.   This [Read More]

  • A new behaviour when creating fully allocated volumes on SVC/Storwize V7.5 and later

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 14th October 2015 The support team are telling me that a lot of people are surprised by a new feature we introduced in SVC 7.5, which we didn’t do the best job in describing or documenting.  What you are seeing is a new Running Task appearing in the GUI when you create a [Read More]