Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • The Storage Egg timer

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 15th August 2009 13,321 views on developerworks I, like a lot of you that take the time out of your lives to read blog ramblings, you probably have your top 3 or 4 authors that you will read no matter what they say – maybe the next 10 that you read just the title, and based on the grab line, may or may not read, then the others that may simply read when you have nothing better to do. I was recommended a book by fellow IBM Blogger Tony Pearson when I started spilling my thoughts, and it… [Read More]

    The Storage Egg timer

  • Seems like history – 2 years go by like that!

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 8th August 2009 13,792 views on developerworks Seems like a lot of water, in the case of Farley and Burke – a lot of smack ups – but it feels like smack downs to me… 😉 has gone under the bridge. Looking back at my first part work, some 24 months ago, it would look like Invista was still maybe being banded about as a ‘serious’ option, and many people were looking at the (now gone) Incipient, to back up EMC’s dumb decision to go out of band / packet cracking… It may seem like an obvious decision… [Read More]

    Seems like history – 2 years go by like that!

  • But when isn’t it?

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 1st August 2009 11,246 views on developerworks Yet another couple of weeks go by. July is our busy month at home and with family. 4 birthdays (including my own yesterday), 1 anniversary, and of course the start of the school holidays. For those that follow me on twitter and facebook, the Millenium Falcon was an epic Lego project for Callum and I, and now has pride of place in his bedroom. I was going to start by saying how busy stuff had been at work, but then that seems to be the norm these days. I’ve found myself… [Read More]

    But when isn’t it?

  • Online Data Migration

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 1st July 2009 17,738 views on developerworks These days I’m spending more and more of my time with customers visiting Hursley wanting to hear about our smart planet initiatives, how we can help to make their infrastructure dynamic and of course most of my involvement in this is around presenting how and where SVC and storage virtualizaton fits in the bigger picture. The executive briefing center in Hursley has the added benefit that it can draw on the SVC development team based here, not to mention CICS, Messaging, Java, and Websphere. This is especially helpful when a customer… [Read More]

    Online Data Migration

  • So just what is SVC – and what does Storage Virtualization REALLY do?

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 27th June 2009 48,074 views on developerworks TOP 10 POST With the move to the new blog software, there is probably a bunch of you that found yourself here, not knowing what this post was going to contain – as well as my regulars that either reap the benefits of SVC every day, or know the patter, but may not know all the benefits. I liken SVC to a mobile phone. 10 years ago plus, a few of us had mobiles, some stayed away, but once you got one… how did you manage without. Thats how I’ve heard… [Read More]

    So just what is SVC – and what does Storage Virtualization REALLY do?

  • SVC: How it works: Split Cluster

    [2019 edit – now referred to as Stretched Cluster] ORIGINALLY POSTED 22nd June 2009 35,919 views on developerworks – TOP 10 POST I thought it was worth spending a few minutes describing a feature that SVC has been supporting for just over a year now. Call it what you want, “Split Cluster”, “Split I/O Group”, “Hyper-swap”, “Pork” (Sorry HAM). After HDS made such a wet fish splash about the wonders of clustered storage, which turned out to be just a method to mirror between two USP-V controllers, with some host software that allowed you to failover between the two should… [Read More]

    SVC: How it works: Split Cluster

  • SVC: Clustered Storage from the ground up

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 27th May 2009 18,746 views on developerworks As we approach SVC’s 6th birthday its interesting to see the rest of the industry starting to catch up and realise not only that a modular commodity storage controller is the way forward, but that also clustering of said modular controllers has many benefits. We all await todays announcement of HDS where various people have speculated they will be enabling users to cluster new USP-V monoliths. I guess a similar story to the way in which EMC tried to make out that Pepsi-Max – sorry VMax – was anything other than… [Read More]

  • “MAX POWER” – spin doctor-tastic

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 6th May 2009 13,717 views on developerworks The “modular monolith” has arrived. Oh how the EMC spin doctors must have jumped for joy when they realised the next version of the almost 20 year old Symmetrix family, the DMX-5 could also mean DMX-V in roman numerals. Better still lets try and jazz it up furter, how about DMX V-“Max”. Oh how 1990’s. My first thought was those “chavved up Nova’s” [CHAV] [NOVA] and the mildly amusing Max Power” magazine in the UK. How to take something that wasn’t really designed to be ‘chavved up’ and do just that.… [Read More]

    “MAX POWER” – spin doctor-tastic

  • Fullerton Singapore Experience true Virtualization

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 24th April 2009 8,081 views on developerworks I’ve been head down for the last few weeks, getting a chance to enhance a chunk of code in the middle of the SVC code stack for the next release, the cache. SVC caching is based on an LRU (Least Recently Used) cache model with partitioning added to make things cope with differing capabilities of the attached storage controllers. Look to any such ‘heterogeneous’ storage virtualizer to provide similar capabilities. Global caching is great for a monolith, but in a a truly virtualized solution you need to be sure that a… [Read More]

    Fullerton Singapore Experience true Virtualization