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Latest Post
Spectrum Virtualize – Policy Based Replication – Guest post by Chris Bulmer
BW: Its been a while since I had a guest post and who better to complete the series of articles discussing… [Read More]
Previous Posts
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Kicking up a ‘Flash’-flood
ORIGINALLY POSTED 7th September 2008 11,310 views on developerworks I was excited about the press release and finally making public news of our work with SVC and NAND flash technology, but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer scale of the press coverage we would get! Just google “IBM quicksilver” for an idea of the coverage – the first day of the release there was almost nothing, now over 800,000 hits… There’s a few independent articles, many re-hashes of the press release, and even my discussions with Mr Burke lead to an article on EETimes. We are doing well at the… [Read More]
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1M IOPs from Flash – Actions speak louder than words
ORIGINALLY POSTED 21st August 2008 25,019 views on developerworks – TOP 10 POST Its been so difficult to keep all this to myself over the last few months, especially last month when we actually reached our goal. 1 Million real life IOPs at less than 1ms – no caching, just pure raw performance. You may, or may not have seen the IBM press release, covering the first part of IBM’s flash and SSD strategy. Unlike some vendors, we didn’t want to just jump on the band wagon, and make some vague statements about following in EMC’s footsteps and simply plugging… [Read More]
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Survived my first year
ORIGINALLY POSTED 5th August 2008 8,018 views on developerworks It seems hard to believe that its been a year since my first post on this blog. As it seems with all things as we get older, in some ways it seems only yesterday, but in other ways its feels like I’ve always been here… Anyway, just a quickie post to say thanks to all my readers, comment-ers, and the storage blogging community who have made the last year a fun, amusing, and rewarding one (well most of you ;-P ) Here’s to the next year, and I hope my ramblings… [Read More]
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Just what is non-disruptive?
ORIGINALLY POSTED 23rd July 2008 14,567 views on developerworks I was catching up on a few interesting comments on BarryB’s post about the evolution of DMX – notice how he deftly ignored my loaded questions about host side IOPs / MBs – but then we all know EMC, for some reason, just won’t publish any kind of yardstick for their products – ho hum. Anyway, the following comments got me thinking about what we as vendors mean by non-disruptive. We all use it to describe upgrades to our boxes, to varying degrees of accuracy and realism. I have to therefore… [Read More]
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Happy 5th Birthday SVC
ORIGINALLY POSTED 12th July 2008 12,288 views on developerworks Before I forget I wanted to wish SVC all the best in its 6th year in production. I guess it seems a lot longer, but then I have been (like a lot of the team) working on it for over 8 years now. IBM just celebrated its 50th year at the Hursley site. For those of you that don’t know Hursley, its probably one of the nicest places you could ask to work. The main ‘house’ in its current form was rebuilt in the Victorian era building on Georgian brick building… [Read More]
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Morcombe and Wise
ORIGINALLY POSTED 3rd July 2008 13,783 views on developerworks I thought after the 4.3.0 release I’d have a bit more spare time to post more often, however I’m working on a couple of interesting projects that have really taken off over the last few months and I’m once again flat out, not to mention being asked to start benchmarking things already waiting to be added to the 4.3.1 code stream… I do want to take some time to explain why most of what Mr Burke has tried to imply about SVC and its SEV is really just the somewhat unsurprising… [Read More]
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SVC 4.3.0 – Virtual Disk Mirroring (VDM) and more
ORIGINALLY POSTED 18th June 2008 16,511 views on developerworks I see that Hu thought he’d better make up some mumbo-jumbo about their ‘chubby-provisioning’ solution. I did post a comment but, as usual, his moderating means he ignores comments he doesn’t like. I’d point you back to my discussion about random 4K writes randomly across a large volume, say one hits every 50 to 100MB apart. Very quickly in HDS’s solution you will have fully-provisioned the disk… Can anyone enlighten me on what he’s talking about with respect to de-frag? When we allocate a ‘grain’ of say 32K, its a contiguous… [Read More]
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SVC 4.3.0 – SEV and SEFC in detail
ORIGINALLY POSTED 13th June 2008 13,095 views on developerworks As I promised yesterday this post is devoted to the technical details behind the new Space-Efficient Virtual Disk (SEV) and Space-Efficient FlashCopy (SEFC) functions available for no extra charge upon upgrade to the 4.3.0 software release of SVC. This post covers : SEV Implementation Details SEV Meta-data Management Configuration & Application Implications SEV with FlashCopy – SEFC SEV Implementation details In previous posts I have described how SVC is implemented as a stack of I/O components, each of these performs a specific encapsulated function, with the interface between each component being… [Read More]
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SVC 4.3.0 Space Efficient (Thin Provisioing), Mirroring and much more
ORIGINALLY POSTED 12th June 2008 14,964 views on developerworks So at last I can explain one of the reasons why we’ve all been so busy for the last six months with the somewhat landmark 4.3.0 release of our SVC software. Its been a while since we released a new I/O function, in fact over 18 months since GlobalMirror was released, but this time we have three. Space-Efficient Virtual Disks (SEV) – the SVC implementation of what is commonly known in the industry as thin provisioning. Secondly, with the introduction of SEV, we now support Space-Efficient FlashCopy (SEFC). The third new… [Read More]
Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage 