Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • Introducing Spectrum Virtualize 7.8.1

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 9th March 2017 14,783 views on developerworks I completely missed the announcement a couple of weeks ago for version 7.8.1 of the Spectrum Virtualize software. Traveling too much at the end of last month and forgot to post an update on whats new. This release I am dubbing the ‘customer council’ release. Last year we started a customer council, a by invitation, group of key customers using Spectrum Virtualize in one form or another, and have been for some time. The idea being to get a good insight into how they are using it, what pain points they… [Read More]

    Introducing Spectrum Virtualize 7.8.1

  • Configuring RAID/DRAID Best Practice – Storwize & FlashSystem

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 13th January 2017 TOP 10 POST – 50,563 views on developerworks Here’s another topic I often get asked about. Things used to be quite simple and I covered this for many years in my Configuring for Optimal Performance series of technical university presentations (also here on the blog – parts 1, 2, 3) – and the basics are still the same when configuring RAID arrays, but now with DRAID, people are asking if this still applies. In general the same rules and concepts apply, but you may have to adjust some of the thinking, particularly when you are… [Read More]

  • Quorum, How does it work? SVC and Storwize

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 10th January 2017 19,712 views on developerworks Spectrum Virtualize Quorum Happy New Year to all. I’ve been getting a few questions relating to quorum devices, and in particular the IP quorum and what happens when various different failure scenarios occur. I thought it was worth detailing things here. So first some background. What are quorum devices? All Spectrum Virtualize systems are clusters. Even a single control enclosure of a Storwize system is a 2 node cluster. The system uses a voting set of nodes to ensure that the majority of the cluster nodes continue when there is a… [Read More]

  • Introducing Spectrum Virtualize 7.8.0 (Now GA)

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 19th December 2016 11,967 views on developerworks 7.8.0 Spectrum Virtualize Back in November we announce the 7.8 updates for SVC, Storwize and V9000 – the products running Spectrum Virtualize software, and a new expansion enclosure offering over 1.4PB RAW capacity in just 5U rack space… Transparent Cloud Tiering TCT is IBM’s general overarching name for functions that are enabling existing products to live and work seamlessly in new Hybrid Cloud environments. I mention this, as TCT was already released on Spectrum Scale to enable cloud storage capacity to be used as a natively integrated  storage tier within the… [Read More]

    Introducing Spectrum Virtualize 7.8.0 (Now GA)

  • All Flash Storage – Why RAID Matters

    GUEST POST by Distinguished Engineer – Dr Bill Scales  Today we are lucky to have the first in a series of guest posts from Dr Bill Scales. Bill is one of the lead product architects in the storage team in Hursley. Bills depth and breadth of knowledge of storage systems is second to none, which means there is always a queue of people waiting to pick his brains in the office!  Enjoy. All Flash Storage – Why RAID Matters – by Dr Bill Scales The high speed of Flash storage has changed where the performance bottlenecks are in storage systems.… [Read More]

    All Flash Storage – Why RAID Matters

  • Egg Timers, a Million Pounds and Tier1 Flash

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 24th August 2016 8,902 views on developerworks Yesterday I spent an hour or so looking for something I knew was out in the blogosphere so I could pull down the reference to it, its frustrating that even when you know something is out there, and no amount of google search phrases can find it for you. But what I did find was a couple of my old posts from back in about 2008/9 discussing a couple of interesting things. Firstly I found a post where I was knocking Hu Yoshida over at HDS for being a marketing blog…… [Read More]

    Egg Timers, a Million Pounds and Tier1 Flash

  • Introducing the Next Gen Storwize V7000 (Gen2+) and SVC (SV1)

    Spectrum Virtualize 7.7.1 & All-flash ORIGINALLY POSTED 23rd Augudst 2016 12,008 views on developerworks Just to make life as difficult as possible for the development and test teams, and not content with refreshing the lower end Storwize V5000 products earlier this year, today IBM is announcing a refresh to the Storwize V7000, FlashSystem V9000 and SVC platforms, some new all-flash variants of Storwize with the latest software version 7.7.1 The cornerstone of these announcements is the ongoing commitment to customer business value as we move more and more towards Flash dominated storage environments. These new platforms provide efficient boosts in… [Read More]

    Introducing the Next Gen Storwize V7000 (Gen2+) and SVC (SV1)

  • You probably have some more license than you thought…

    Introducing Differential Licensing Over the years its become clear that a TB isn’t what it used to be, for example the maximum tier of SVC license capacity back in 2003 was 32TB… so things have changed. We wanted to reflect this in the managed (mdisk) capacity licensing. Not all TB are equal… In order to maintain current licensing tiers and existing entitlement, we have transitioned the measure of units. Taking from todays per TB license, to a new Storage Capacity Unit (SCU) license. 1TB today = 1SCU. So if you have 500TB license today, you now have 500SCU As I… [Read More]

    You probably have some more license than you thought…

  • Introducing Spectrum Virtualize 7.7.0 (Part3)

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 10th June 2016 10,191 views on developerworks Last week I covered some of the main updates in the 7.7.0 release of Spectrum Virtualize, this week I am in IBM RTP in North Carolina and can fill you in on yet more! New Flash and Drive Options Lower Cost Flash Drives Just as we have had different price and performance point spinning HDD options for years, so now we are starting to see different Solid State Drive options as applicable in the enterprise storage market. For this reason, we have introduced the first of a new family of Flash… [Read More]

    Introducing Spectrum Virtualize 7.7.0 (Part3)