Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • Re: Using Virtualization for DR

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 8th September 2007 (UNFORTUNATELY developerworks HAS LOST THE FIGURE IMAGES!) 12,376 views on developerworks. Chris posted an interesting solution to provide 3DC disaster recovery, yet only having local virtualization devices. I posted a couple of responses to this question, and commented that this is a complex area of I/O flow and I would describe here how SVC ensures the remote site is – what we call – consistent. That is, the remote site must always contain a useable copy of the data, which may be slightly behind the local site when asynchronous replication (GlobalMirror) is used. However this… [Read More]

    Re: Using Virtualization for DR

  • Storage Virtualization – Part4 – Interoperability

    ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 3rd September 2007 10,601 Views on developerworks Talk to any storage or system administrator and one of their major pain points (after data movement pains) is making A work with B and keeping C at the right firmware level so that A works with C as well as B and so on. Sometimes this just isn’t possible and can lead to infrastructure ‘exceptions’ which complicate the environment even further. Over at RupturedMonkey you can see one such issue, and an understandable vent of frustration! It is a difficult problem for anyone to solve, especially when vendor A doesn’t… [Read More]

    Storage Virtualization – Part4 – Interoperability

  • Stealth Announcements – Invista v2

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 1st September 2007 10,690 views on developerworks I find it interesting that v2 of Invista has been so quietly ‘introduced’ – very unlike EMC. I spotted a reference to it a few months back on Mark’s blog, but couldn’t find any press or EMC website coverage. The article from CBR covers some interesting points that I wanted to bring up here. I’ve already made reference to the ‘humour’ from D’Errico. Isn’t there something to be said for ‘the first thing that comes to mind is always the truth’… Anyway, I’d also question the remark regarding : “its most… [Read More]

    Stealth Announcements – Invista v2

  • OFF TOPIC – Mini Rant – Aqua Spheres

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 30th August 2007 4,941 views on developerworks One of the few things that really does wind me up is the utter nonsense that certain cosmetics companies try to claim as having “age-purifying” or “wrinkle-decrease” abilities. I remember a few years back a classic “aqua-sphere’s” ad campaign… so your product contains water… But I fell about laughing tonight when I saw an advert for the latest product with the age-revitalizing properties of… wait for it… OXYGEN… I wonder if I could market a product, costs you £20 a jar, I have an endless supply of, and contains 16% pure… [Read More]

    OFF TOPIC – Mini Rant – Aqua Spheres

  • Storage Virtualization – Part3 – Performance

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 22nd August 2007 14,786 views on developerworks Cornerstone #5 The potential to increase system performance While this topic directly corresponds with ‘Cornerstone #5’ it does also contribute #2 Simplification of storage management and #4 Increased storage utilization Pooling and Striping Most enterprise level controllers, the likes of DS8000, DMX and USP, and some mid-range controllers provide a degree of array pooling. That is, a method to concatenate the capacity provided by more than one RAID array into a single pool of usable capacity. Thus, luns are provisioned by carving up a chunk of this pool. One of the… [Read More]

    Storage Virtualization – Part3 – Performance

  • Over-allocation vs Virtualization

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 19th August 2007 11,147 views on developerworks I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion around the topic of Thin Provisioning vs Storage Virtualization as we know it today. While its true that when compared with other uses of Virtualization, todays storage devices don’t pretend to have more space than there is – unless you use Thin Provisioning or the more accurate term ‘Over-allocation’. In fact, todays Virtualization devices do almost the inverse, they pretend to be a single virtual disk when there may be many arrays providing the capacity being used. Whatever, the term ‘Storage virtualization’ is pretty… [Read More]

    Over-allocation vs Virtualization

  • Kids these days

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 18th August 2007 8,309 views on developerworks Our eldest son (just turned 5) has been on school holidays for the last few weeks – driving my wife round the twist and winding his little sister up a treat at the same time. Today was my last day in the office for a week or so and we have the usual ‘kids’ stuff planned for next week. Anyway, my son discovered the PC in the dining room a few months ago, and after working out how to play ‘Simpsons Hit and Run’ and pestering me to help him with… [Read More]

    Kids these days

  • All too easy to use 8Gbits

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 17th August 2007 7,479 views on developerworks While doing my late night catch up on whats being said out there, I had meant to post on Chris Evans’ previous topic about 8Gb Fibre Channel. His latest post reminding me to explore this a bit further. In an answer to the question about why 8Gbit and not 10Gbit, 8Gbit has the advantage of being backwards compatible, whereas 10Gbit is a completely different beast. I guess the question is more why did they go 10Gbit for ISLs and not 8Gbit – maybe its a play into data center ethernet afterall.… [Read More]

    All too easy to use 8Gbits

  • Getting new stuff out the door

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 17th August 2007 9654 Views on developerworks Over at ‘zilla central Mark is discussing the many millions of dollars devoted to research and development products, and in particular how few of them actually make it out into the field as fully fledged products. Back in the late 90’s IBM’s Research lab in Almaden were busy constructing just such an R&D project, codenamed ‘COMPASS’ – essentially a close to real-time clustering development environment aimed at using commodity parts as its hardware base. Since this was coming out of the storage research team, it was aimed in particular at exploring… [Read More]

    Getting new stuff out the door