Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • TechTalk – Flash Performance – 29th June 2021

    As a lot of you know, IBM helps to run a set of world-wide user groups across many of its products. Pre-COVID I had the pleasure of meeting many of our Virtualize family world-wide, and over the last 18 months we’ve continued these events, all be it in a virtual form. The Nordic User Group, which grew out of the original “TSM” (Spectrum Protect) user group has gone from strength to strength and just last week we had over 325 people registered for the Spring event. Who knows, come Winter we maybe back to “in-person” – who knows! As well… [Read More]

  • What code level should I use? Introducing Continuous Development for Spectrum Virtualize

    We often get asked what is the recommended code level that a client should use. While this isn’t as difficult a question as anything performance related, I’m afraid the answer still often starts with “it depends” ! V.R.M.F – Version Release Maintenance Fix First off its worth ensuring you understand the code numbering. Everything Spectrum Virtualize uses the VRMF standard for version naming. Until now, the VRM part has been fairly abitrary, or more to the point, they changed in a fairly arbitrary manner! The V, major version would be changed when a significant licensing change to the products occurred,… [Read More]

  • Introducing IBM FlashSystem 5200

    IBM’s most compact, high capacity & performant entry FlashSystem to date. February 9th 2021 IBM introduced the latest member of the Spectrum Virtualize based FlashSystem family, somewhat unique in the mainstream storage industry coming in at just 1U high, but with power, performance, capacity and functionality that makes this a huge box in a tiny package. Being 1U high, the enclosure supports up to 12 NVMe based drives. These can be an mixture of IBM FlashCore Modules (FCM), industry standard NVMe flash drives, or the supported Storage Class Memory drives. With just 12 drives, you may dismiss this and think… [Read More]

    Introducing IBM FlashSystem 5200

  • The NVMe Revolution

    I hope everyone is staying safe and well in these unusual times (COVID-19 year 2 if reading this in the future!). As some of you may know, one of my hobbies is writing EDM style music, having built up a synth and drum machine collection over many years. During the lockdowns and force travel restrictions I’ve recently got into actually building synths and drum machines. From clones of Roland’s 303 and 909 to full six voice synth modules (Mutable Ambika). So what has this got to do with NVMe you may be wondering. Well one of the things I’ve learned… [Read More]

  • Save the date : 9th February – Revolutionize the entry-enterprise storage space.

    Join us on the 9th February for a special announcement webinar where we bring you details of a brand new member of the Spectrum Virtualize and FlashSystem family… It’s time to revolutionize the entry-enterprise storage space. You are challenged to deliver more with less budget. You need to optimize your IT infrastructure to drive growth without sacrificing performance, quality or security of your IT services. Join us on February 9, 2021 to discover how businesses of all sizes can realize infrastructure transformation with industry leading performance, cost efficiency, high availability and enterprise-class hybrid cloud storage. Small footprint. Huge impact. High… [Read More]

    Save the date : 9th February – Revolutionize the entry-enterprise storage space.

  • Lets get this right, once and for all, ALUA != passive – Active/Active is not precluded by ALUA

    First off, I wrote about this seven years ago… but it seems the usual suspects and some newcomers are back on the FUD spreading band-wagon trying to say that ALUA must mean active/passive … it doesn’t! Secondly lets get the main fact on the table straight away : Spectrum Virtualize, hence SVC, Storwize and FlashSystem are all active/active controllers both in terms of pathing and I/O processing. IBM has never implemented an active/passive solution. Most vendors have gone away from them too (EMC) – except Pure, who implement active/active paths, but active/passive I/O handling and try to claim it as… [Read More]

  • Virtual TechU 2020 – Follow up Questions

    Hi Everyone, The Virtual TechU is nearly here – and once again if you watch any of my sessions and want to ask follow up questions, please feel free to add a comment to this post so I can get back to you. My main session is about how IBM has been enhancing the support experience – so I hope you find it interesting if you watch it. Andrew [Read More]

  • Why doesn’t SVC support/need backend NVMe-FC connections?

    This question has come up a few times in recent conversations, and was asked at the recent German virtual Storage Strategy Days event. Evelyn Perez covered this in the Q&A session, but I thought it was worthy of a post to help explain. The question comes in various guises, either “When will you support”, “Does it support” or “Why doesn’t it support”. Hopefully this will answer them all. Polling vs Interrupt We need to do a little bit of a technical level set first around how a hardware device driver works. There are two main types of device driver. The… [Read More]

  • Tips and tricks using the Spectrum Virtualize REST API

    Hi all, I’ve been getting some questions recently about using the Spectrum Virtualize REST API, and I noticed that the documentation is missing some useful information. So I thought I’d put together some tips based on what I have been able to find out so far. If you have questions or your own tips – please ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer and update this page for the benefit of others. There are many ways that you can send commands using REST APIs – I’m going to do almost all my examples using CURL –… [Read More]