Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • Isn’t that exactly the point?

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 20th March 2009 11,899 views on developerworks Funny, I had been thinking about blogging about a customer visit I had this week, primarily a new SVC user wanting to discuss and go into some deeper technical insight into the product. I enjoy these days as its a chance to talk techy with someone who is actually using and hopefully benefiting from the fruits of our labour here in development land. The reason I say it’s funny is that this customer just got it. They saw the benefit and primarily the “commoditisation” aspects of SVC – and virtualization for… [Read More]

    Isn’t that exactly the point?

  • Information Infrastructure – Dynamic Infrastructure

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 9th February 2009 12,963 views on developerworks Following last Septembers “Information Infrastructure” launch, IBM today announced wave two subtitled Dynamic Infrastructure. The press release covers some of the higher level details, and a new “DI” portal has been created on the IBM website. From a disk and storage perspective the DS8000 gets three new drive types – including full disk encryption (with the necessary key management) – 1TB native SATA drive support (not FATA) – and of course STEC Fibre SSD device support – with enablement including zDB2 optimisation. Much as our friends Burke and Hollis would have… [Read More]

    Information Infrastructure – Dynamic Infrastructure

  • Did it need a press release?

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 4th February 2009 8,501 views on developerworks If SVC put out a press release every time we qualified a new controller behind the cluster we’d be putting out one every couple of weeks. To claim in such a way that this was a new an interesting thing to do with a TMS RAMSAN is also a stretch… I am of course referring to yesterdays release from NetApp – which left a lot of the storage folks on Twitter wondering if we’d missed something. A few others have commented on this in the blogosphere, Zilla has tackled this in… [Read More]

    Did it need a press release?

  • Is that the time already?

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 29th January 2009 10,787 views on developerworks Seriously, where has January gone? OK, so we have a couple of days left, but it seems only yesterday I was feeling relaxed and rested after a nice couple of weeks off over the festive season… then wham… We are deep in the middle of a major development phase, things are coming together that have been in progress for some time, and the time on my performance stand is at a premium. With owning a major bit of architecture at the moment, I’ve got designs and specs scribbled all over scraps… [Read More]

    Is that the time already?

  • 2008 – A retrospective

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 12th January 2009 12,933 views on developerworks It seems a common thread in technology blogs to post some predictions for the coming year. However, as I’m not an analyst and don’t profess to understand the entire storage industry, I thought I’d keep to a brief history of 2008 as I saw it – obviously with an IBM and SVC slant on things. This isn’t just a vendor marketing affair however, and you’ll notice a few things missing, but where are we as I see it today. Caught in a Vapor-trail I see a lot of folks off in… [Read More]

  • SVC: How it works – Part4 Software & Hardware Upgrades in place

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 18th December 2008 8,698 views on developerworks In the final part of my ‘How it Works’ series I’m looking at upgrades. Both software and hardware. Maintenance Windows As the world has moved to a 24x7x52 culture, nobody can really afford many, if any, ‘maintenance windows’ these days. I described in part2 that to move from a non-virtual to a virtual environment you do need to insert the virtualizer into your infrastructure and so re-map the disks, in a before and after style. No matter what virtualizer you choose, today this step is necessary. But you could think of… [Read More]

    SVC: How it works – Part4 Software & Hardware Upgrades in place

  • SVC: How it works – Part3 Manipulate your virtual data

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 14th December 2008 11,836 views on developerworks In part 1 of this series I covered the terminology of SVC. Part 2 showed how you would introduce existing volumes into a virtualized environment using SVC. In part 3 I cover the ‘now what’… Making the most of it Once you have imported the data, you now have a set of disks that are simply running in ‘image mode’ – its likely you want to make the most of the benefits that SVC can provide. You have various choices. You could be approaching the end-of-lease of your existing storage, moving… [Read More]

    SVC: How it works – Part3 Manipulate your virtual data

  • Off radar

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 3rd December 2008 7,852 views on developerworks I’ve been off the radar for a few weeks… A decision I’d made myself, its been a hectic year, and I realised I’d been spending too much time at/with work and not enough with the family. So I decided, despite only being a Scotsman abroad (ok abroad meaning south of the border) I’d take at least the thanks-giving week off in the evenings! I have a few things to catch up on, dotConnector woke up to my prods a few weeks back to try and further discredit the SPC and I… [Read More]

  • SVC: How it works – Part2

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 11th November 2008 11,497 views on developerworks In part2 of this “HiW” – How it Works – discussion of SVC, I look at how you can take an existing SAN infrastructure and Virtualize it. Import your Data Its likely that today you have a SAN of some kind. It maybe a couple of 32 port switches, or it maybe a pair (or more) of enterprise class Directors with many hundreds of ports each. Should you be in the position where you have more than one disk controller then SVC could be the answer to your admin headaches. You… [Read More]

    SVC: How it works – Part2