Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • 2010-41: A Brief History of “recent” Time – Part3

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 3rd October 2010 16,162 views on developerworks 2000-2007 The “Virtual” Storage – SAN Virtualization Appliance Years First of all thanks again for all the feedback regarding this series of posts, great that people are enjoying a bit of a history lesson, or even a reminder into your own histories! So where was I… The Hursley team was in a bit of flux around the end of the last century, we’d been masters of our own destiny in a way with the 7133 and SSa products and seen close to $B revenues as a result of our efforts. With… [Read More]

  • 2010-39: A Brief History of “recent” Time – Part2

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 23rd September 2010 11,998 views on developerworks The “Shark” and FC-AL Years – 1998-present Last time I briefly covered the Hursley Storage team’s work on the 7133 – Serial Storage Architecture products. Thanks for all the emails about this, and I’m glad people still remember it – fondly?! Those screwdrivers – and Martin, i think most of the screwdrivers were multi-coloured, its the single coloured ones that are rare 🙂 In the mid 90’s our counterparts in Tucson were working on what was then known as CPSS (Common Parts Storage Sub-system) which became also know as “Shark” and… [Read More]

    2010-39: A Brief History of “recent” Time – Part2

  • 2010-38: A Brief History of “recent” Time – Part1

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 15th September 2010 17,983 views on developerworks The Serial Storage Architecture Years 1990-1998 Its been a crazier than ever year. All will become clear soon. But one of the things I wanted to discuss with you all is just what kind of history comes with the team of ~150 storage people that I work with on a daily basis. Of course there are a WHOLE bunch more people that are involved, but when it comes to raw, at the coal face, day to day work, the rest of them wouldn’t have anything to do unless the team here… [Read More]

    2010-38: A Brief History of “recent” Time – Part1

  • 2010-34: 14 weeks

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 19th August 2010 11,279 views on developerworks I knew it had been a while, but I wouldn’t have guessed it was 14 weeks since I last posted. Nothing much changes thought, the NetApp fan boys are being just as defensive as ever, EMC (well Mr Symm) are still spending as much time writing about IBM and its dieing products, if DS8000 had died as many times as Mr Burke suggested, we should be-renaming it CAT8000, since it must have 9 lives… I can assure you all its very much alive and kicking, and will continue on for many… [Read More]

  • 2010-24: Still alive and Verplexed

    ORIGINALLY POSTEED 10th June 2010 12,877 views on developerworks  After a couple of weeks of car hell, that resulted in the entire removal of the intake manifold, just to get to the darn crappy sensor that had packed up (and Land Rover informed me was the 3rd re-design – in any other business that would mean ‘ 2x faulty design) but anyway, thanks Geoff for the help in removing and fitting and now the TD4 has sprung back into life. Meanwhile work overload continues… 6.1 with everything it entails has and is keeping the whole team and more 100% saturated.… [Read More]

    2010-24: Still alive and Verplexed

  • 2010-14: Announcing DS8000 Easy Tier

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 13th April 2010 15,787 views on developerworks So after all the EMC hype, and all the claims that the DS8000 was “pushing up daises” it seems that IBM have managed to announce the GA of ship our sub-lun hot-spot management, aka Easy Tier before EMC have shipped their FAST function. Now, before you all jump and say EMC have been shipping FAST since last year, I don’t count version 1 as anything more than LUN migration, something we’ve been shipping in SVC since 2003. The only real version of FAST that matters is version 2 where it can… [Read More]

    2010-14: Announcing DS8000 Easy Tier

  • 2010-14: V-ista, V-plex: it must have the V…

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 30th March 2010 14,050 views on developerworks I wrote this a few weeks back – was waiting for the right time to post – and for once it seems Hu and I are coming from the same place! Its likely a lot of my regulars have heard of Yotta Yotta. To all extents and purposes they produced and interesting SAN cache prototype. It used lazy writes to enable a local 2-way cache to be more dispersed but lazily updating writes to remote caching nodes. It was a kind of competitor to SVC, but it never really got any… [Read More]

    2010-14: V-ista, V-plex: it must have the V…

  • 2010-09: Tiering and PAM. Just a slow expensive DDR?

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 28th February 2010 14,778 views on developerworks There has been a lot of twitter banter, and blog posts about Tiering. Netapp claiming you don’t need to tier, EMC and IBM saying tiering is important and 3Par Farley going so far as to say that Netapp can’t do tiering easily, hence their response, and discussion of PAM being the way to resolve. I had always been lead to believe the PAM (Performance Acceleration Module) was flash based, but when I did some googling this week, I was suprised to find its basically a PCIe card with some DDR modules… [Read More]

    2010-09: Tiering and PAM. Just a slow expensive DDR?

  • 2010-05: New IBM World Record SPC-1 Result

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 3rd February 2010 12,777 views on developerworks You may have already seen that SVC has yet again set a new world record benchmark when it comes to the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 benchmark. The initial planning called for a full eight node test – as we normally do, and the manufacturing requests were put in to setup the 4000+ HDD configuration needed to saturate an 8 node CF8 cluster running the SVC 5.1. code. However, as this was mid 4Q, and customer orders are always fullfilled in preference to internal requests, late in the day we could only… [Read More]

    2010-05: New IBM World Record SPC-1 Result