Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • 2010-03: Encouraging SSD Adoption

    ORIGINALLY POSTED January 24th 2010 10,022 views on developerworks I’ve just been through some of our detailed results for 4Q, given that we only announced availability of the new CF8 hardware back in November and exceeded expectations with their adoption. Over the quarter Tivoli Storage Software, which SVC comes under, saw double digit growth. The up-take of the stunning new node hardware is great, and I’ve already had a few reports back from customers who have undertaken the concurrent software and hardware upgrade. This involves following a special procedure that we have made available to allow users running the original… [Read More]

    2010-03: Encouraging SSD Adoption

  • 2010-02.2: Benchmarketing

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 14th January 2010 9,231 views on developerworks Two posts in one week. Doing well. I set one of my resolutions this year to post at least once a week – hence my new numbering scheme. Maybe I’ll use the fact that 2010-2.2 and further double posts count for the odd week I may miss 🙂 Benchmarketing. It’s a dodgy term, and even dodgier maths. We all know and love Hitachi’s maths, and I couldn’t help but comment back at SNW about several hundred PB behind a controller than can only do 200K IO/s – glad a few astute… [Read More]

  • 2010-02: Hursley in Winter

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 11th January 2010 9,744 views on developerworks A lot of you may have seen the NASA satellite photo of the UK last week, certainly you can’t deny that the snow has hit pretty much the whole country, the contrast compared to a normal satellite image is quite amazing. Images courtesy of NEODAAS/University of Dundee While most of last week I was working at home, I did venture in on Friday to make some physical changes to my iSCSI setup to wire in some different nodes, and took the chance to grab a few quick snaps of Hursley in… [Read More]

  • 2010-01: Having the right equipment

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 7th January 2010 9,511 views on developerworks  Happy New Year to all. As you may know, or have seen the UK is currently under the grip of winter. A few inches of snow and the country comes to a stand-still. Maybe I’m getting old an cynical (some may say no maybe about it!) but I do remember walking to school in drifts of over 2 foot back in Glasgow… I don’t remember a day when the school was closed due to snow… maybe the odd teacher from far a field couldn’t make it in, but most did. Now… [Read More]

    2010-01: Having the right equipment

  • SVC 5.1 GA – Zero Detection and Cache Tweaking

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 10th November 2009 15,995 views on developerworks The kids very kindly passed on their latest ‘bring-home’ from school – a stinking cold! Been feeling pretty rotten since I got back from SNWE in Frankfurt a couple of weeks back – so hopefully I didn’t pass it on to anyone I met there! Was a great couple of days, thanks to everyone that came along for my keynote, was good to see so many people interested, and I only noticed one person who’d fallen, or was falling asleep 🙂 Last Friday SVC 5.1.0 was made generally available – you… [Read More]

  • SVC 5.1 – SSD Mirroring Options – The holy grail?

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 21st October 2009 10,997 views on developerworks So far I have concentrated on the hardware side of the new SVC 5.1 release, thats probably because after the work I did with IBM Almaden Research last year on Project Quicksilver, I became the architect for the sub-SVC project to add SSD support to SVC. The tecnology demo set the scene and luckily we’d already been looking at how we could use existing SVC functionality to make a production storage device like Quicksilver using the SVC code base. Given that one of the value propositions of SSD is a reduction… [Read More]

  • In depth: CF8 Hardware and SSD Support

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 15th October 2009 14,844 views on developerworks This is a bit of an opus I’m afraid, but I’ve had my hands tied for so long in what I could / couldn’t say so think of this as a catch up for my last 6 months of sporadic posting! Please do try to make it to the end, I’m covering a lot here! In my last post I covered whats coming with SVC 5.1 at a very high level. Over the next few posts I’ll be delving into the details. This post covers the new node engine hardware and… [Read More]

    In depth: CF8 Hardware and SSD Support

  • New SVC 5.1 – CF8 Node with Native SSD Support

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 14th October 2009 17,301 views on developerworks I’ve been waiting for what seems like far too long for this series of posts. The development and test teams have been working flat out for the last year to bring SVC 5.1 to market. Today IBM issued a press release detailing a little of whats coming next month with SVC release 5 software, the new ‘CF8’ node hardware. The node is based on the recently released Intel Xeon 5500, Nehelam CPUs and provides a PCIe gen2 bus into which we’ve put a new 8 Gbit 4 port QE8 based HBA.… [Read More]

    New SVC 5.1 – CF8 Node with Native SSD Support

  • A Brief History of Areal Density

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 18th September 2009 29,670 views on developerworks TOP 10 POST I find I start so many posts these days describing how busy I’ve been as an excuse to why my post frequency has been lower than normal. This has to have been a new record as I spotted my last post was over a month ago. This time however I do have a much better excuse, two weeks time off away from everything to do with work, finding gold (you fool) within quartz rocks on the old tin mining coastline of North Cornwall and generally messing about with… [Read More]