Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • Here we go again…

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 29th May 2008 11,199 views on developerworks So I almost ‘did a Tony’ just now, spraying my coffee over my screen and keyboard. The reason for this, the recent post from Hu over at HDS. (Its been a while since I even bothered to read his posts, and even longer since I commented on them… I think I can see why Hu no longer ‘interacts’ with his readers, its because he makes up so much nonsense to try and paint the USP as the only way to do virtualization and would find it hard to justify / backup… [Read More]

    Here we go again…

  • Why Virtualize? Part2

    Ye’canny change the laws of physics, cap’n ORIGINALLY POSTED 22nd May 2008 7,259 views on developerworks So I haven’t forgotten I promised a part work on “Why Virtualise?” Last week I was in Phoenix for the IBM CTRE. Each year IBM gathers 500+ of its technical achievers over the last 12 months and honors them with a few days of R&R, meeting with colleagues and of course some good food and wine. I was lucky enough to receive an award for my part in the performance enhancements we achieved last year with the 4.2.0 8G4 hardware release, and its record… [Read More]

    Why Virtualize? Part2

  • Host clusters in 7.7.1 and later

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 21st June 2017 In 7.7.1 we added a long-awaited feature that we have called host clusters.   This feature is not exactly rocket science to understand, but here’s a breakdown of a couple of useful scenarios that you can use it for, and some information about how to configure it.  Note – host cluster support was CLI only in 7.7.1, to use the GUI you’ll have to be running 7.8.1 or later. Major Use Cases 1/ If you have a cluster of hosts (e.g. a set of SVC nodes in front of a V7000), and you want to make… [Read More]

  • Using Dedicated ports for inter-node communication and replication

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 13th August 2017 I’m in Melbourne this week, because I’m attending the Technical University here starting tomorrow.   So I thought that this would be a good time to get through one of my backlog of Blog posts. For a number of years now it has been recommended to have dedicated ports for inter-node communication on SVC.   However I’ve come across a couple of customers recently who haven’t quite configured it right.  Therefore I thought it would be a good idea to go through it here. Lets start with the basics… What inter-node communication does SVC/Storwize do? The nodes… [Read More]

  • Deduping Controllers such as A9000 behind SVC – Parts 1-3

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 13th April 2017 Hi everyone, Its been a long time since I’ve posted here and I apologize for that. Over the last few months, we have been seeing more and more deduping Controllers such as the A9000 being deployed behind SVC.  There are definitely good ways and bad ways to perform over-allocation and dedup behind SVC.  What I want to do is help you learn from the lessons that other customers have learned.   Also – for readability I’m going to write about SVC in front of A9000 in this post (because A9000 is much shorter than saying “SVC,… [Read More]

  • How to have a single volume with a copy in 3 sites

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 13 November 2017 Background It’s been a highly requested feature to have SVC or Storwize keep a single volume available in three sites.  The most common use case is to have a pair of synchronous replication datacentres that provide zero data loss if you have a disaster at a single site, whilst also having a third copy of the data which is geographically further away to protect against the type of issues that can affect an entire city (for example). We have had solutions for some time using the SVC stretched cluster to provide High Availability (HA) across… [Read More]

  • A Hidden new feature in 7.4 that I suggest everyone should enable

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 2nd June 2015 Hi All, Edit:  A number of my colleagues have misunderstood what I mean when I call this a hidden feature.  At no time did anyone want to hide the feature from our customers!  I was merely commenting on the fact that unless someone told you about this feature, there was little chance you would stumble across it.  Hopefully this helps clear things up. About 3 or 4 times a year the Level 3 support team get a panicked call from a customer asking whether it is possible to restore a volume that they deleted accidentally. … [Read More]

  • HDS making a great case for SVC

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 7th May 2008 7,644 views on developerworks Its been a while, and recently I’ve not had the time or inclination to comment about Hu’s blogketing, but a few of us found his recent post amusing. (As we often do) I guess Hu has a dilemma. On the one hand he’s been telling us for a couple of years that Storage Virtualization in the array is the only way to do it, and you should buy USP, USP-V (or one of their clones). But now he has to make a case for the appliance too. I’ve always said that… [Read More]

    HDS making a great case for SVC

  • Why Virtualize? Part1

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 1st May 2008 7,980 views on developerworks Since the explosion of interest in Host based virtualization products like VMware, Zen and Microsofts Hyper-V, it seems like the IBM concept from the 70’s mainframes has really hit home. I remember sitting in on a very early customer focus group when we are mid-development of SVC and the speaker was discussing how virtual memory is taken for granted today, you don’t really think about your pagefile. The speaker went on to describe his vision for storage virtualization, the names are the same because the concept is the same. Abstraction. Let… [Read More]

    Why Virtualize? Part1