Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • SVC: How it works – Part1

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 10th Novembeer 2008 22,769 views on developereworks I thought it was time to get back to some technical content, and with recent blog posts, it clear that there is some confusion over how SVC works. In particular how the actual virtual to physical blocks are mapped, how they can be changed without application disruption, and how you get data into (and if you wanted) out of SVC. Part 1 : Basic Terminology I forget that a lot of my readers aren’t as close to SVC as I am and so here are some basic terms that we use… [Read More]

    SVC: How it works – Part1

  • Hu re-invents terms with dubious speculation

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 8th November 2008 10,944 views on developerworks Is it me? I was wondering, but I was glad to see ‘the bod’ agreed with me. SAN Virtualization, now I’m sure Cisco would claim the term, VSAN’s, logical abstractions etc etc. Storage Virtualization, thats what I do for a living, thats what our customers know they are buying when they implement an SVC system, thats what the INDUSTRY thinks of SVC, USP, Invista (if its still around), DataCore, StoreAge, YY (if they make a re-appearance – maybe its the new Invista?)… or is it me? I commented on Hu’s post… [Read More]

    Hu re-invents terms with dubious speculation

  • Missing the point, Mis-directions, Mis-interpretations

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 31st October 2008 11,476 views on developerworks I’ve posted a long reply to clarify a few things over on the Anarchists post, which is a master piece of missing the point, mis-directions and mis-interpretations, purely aimed at trying to inject further FUD into accepted benchmarks performed by the Storage Performance Council. Lets start with Quicksilver, and our recent 1 Million IOPs statements. Quicksilver was a technology statement – not a science experiment as BarryB would lead you to think. The entire point of this was to show how a scale-out clustered architecture – the foundation of the SVC… [Read More]

    Missing the point, Mis-directions, Mis-interpretations

  • eWeek – Virtualization in general

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 30th October 2008 7,460 views on developerworks Over on eWeek there is a long (24 min) podcast interview hosted by Mike Vizard, and the director of product marketing for IBM System Storage, Charlie Andrews. Charlie explains amongst other things why the rise of virtualization is going to lead to tighter coupling between server and storage management. From a ‘techies’ perspective its also interesting to relate this to what I see from talking with customers and what I see as being possible with the new breed of storage products. More importantly why a product like SVC is key to… [Read More]

    eWeek – Virtualization in general

  • OMG: Hu-itachi maths strikes back

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 22nd October 2008 9,276 views on developerworks Oh My God. I’m sorry, but OMG*! Read cache hits. OK, so we can all do them, we can all do lots of them, but it seems only HDS, or maybe Hu (or whoever writes his marketing page that passes for a blog) thinks that Storage users are blinded by science. We don’t, and even EMC don’t on this one. There is little point in quoting read cache hit numbers, ok so it shows you roughly what a box is technically capable of, but for a real life workload you are… [Read More]

  • New SVC Entry Edition and SEV SPC-1 Publish

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 15th October 2008 10,490 views on developerworks It seems like only a few weeks ago I was covering the release of SVC 4.3.0 with support for Space-efficient Vdisks and Vdisk Mirroring, and here we are again with today’s announce of SVC 4.3.1 software. This time round however its more than just a software release. Until today, mid-sized businesses wishing to deploy virtualized storage have been forced to choose between more costly solutions designed for large enterprises or less robust offerings with limited capability and lower growth potential. IBM System Storage™ SAN Volume Controller Entry Edition Today IBM has… [Read More]

    New SVC Entry Edition and SEV SPC-1 Publish

  • Hursley at 50 and more on Quicksilver

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 24th September 2008 8,068 views on developerworks I was a little out of my normal loop the last week or two. This week is full with customer and potential customer visits. Today we had an SVC stalwart customer visit, to not only provide some great feedback on how SVC has over the last 5 years helped them to reclaim their lives (storage admins can have a life in the evenings and weekends, outside work – because you can now do those things during the working day) but they also gave some details of how they have implemented their… [Read More]

    Hursley at 50 and more on Quicksilver

  • Some people are hard to please

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 11th September 2008 7,362 views on developerworks Last week I was about to post congratulating Chris Mellor on his ‘Blocks and Files’ site being absorbed, acquired, defunct, by his move to The Register. I’ve followed Chris since his days over at TechWorld, where he posted a few articles after reading my blog, abstracting some ‘jouralistic license’ and making 2+2=5. However it was all relatively positive and interesting to see his take. Blocks and Files became one of my regular daily RSS toolbar views, checking what Chris and the team’s perspective on things. I read his post on The… [Read More]

  • SVC and XIV

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 11th September 2008 21,933 views on developerworks The interop just keeps growing. As you would expect you can today attach the new IBM Storage products behind SVC, running the latest 4.3.0 software. SVC has actually supported XIV since August, we completed the controller qualification during our last SVT cycle, and the IBM Storage teams in the US completed the qualification of the DS5000 on our behalf. Why would you want to put XIV behind SVC? Well the same reasons you would put any storage devices behind SVC. You gain all the advanced functions that SVC can provide on… [Read More]

    SVC and XIV