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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
Hybrid Value – find out more at IBM’s Virtual TechU – October 26th-29th
No, I'm not talking about part-time electric vehicles, but I struggled to use the Cloud word in the title.... I find it's often overused and seen as the answer to world peace in IT these days. However, it has to be said that I saw first hand the value of a hybrid cloud environment as... Continue Reading →
Just one more thing… B2S #9 – HyperSwap – DR, HA, technical dive. 22nd July
By popular request we have added one more session to our Back to School series. Over the last two months we have covered everything from IBM's unique advantages with FCMs, through saving you money and footprint with IBM Power Systems, managing exabytes of data with ease to simply backing up data. The sessions are all... Continue Reading →
The Ongoing Need for Tiering
Its always amusing to be pinged by several people asking for comment on the same topic. This time it seems that Pure are trying to use their lack of function (there are several) and sell it as an advantage, while attacking the competition that do have it. I know reverse psychology worked on my kids... Continue Reading →
Why IBM FlashSystem? Back to School Webinar Series – Session 1
Hope everyone is well, we are kicking off a series of Systems events for the AP timezones (since most TechU global session are at non AP friendly timezones! Of course, open to anyone WW if you are awake at the time 🙂 These sessions are open to IBMers, BPs and Clients, please pass on the... Continue Reading →
abilioTalks Podcast – A chat about Flash, FCM, Insights and Cloud
Hope everyone is keeping well and staying safe at this difficult time for all. As the IBM Systems Technical Universities have been postponed until the second half (hopefully), we have been running the TechU Talks sessions, which Andy posted about last week and he presented the first session which you can watch via replay here.... Continue Reading →
DRAID Expansion. The Important Details
When I introduced the updates in Spectrum Virtualize 8.3.1 I promised a dedicated post discussing the details around the new DRAID dynamic expansion feature. Before we dive in, there are some DRAID basic terms that you need to understand. DRAID Basics Check out the DRAID - How it Works post for more details but in... Continue Reading →
Introducing SVC – SV2 & SA2 Node Hardware
So to round off the week, the final thing we announced last month was a refresh to the SVC node's themselves. SVC has been providing our clients with true heterogeneous storage virtualization in the form of an appliance for over 16 years now. Depending on how you count them, these are the 9th generation, and... Continue Reading →
Introducing FlashSystem 5000, 7200 & 9200. FCM Gen2 & SCM
On February 11th/12th 2020 (depending which timezone you are in!) IBM announced that it was updating the entire modular entry, midrange and enterprise block portfolio. The family name of Storwize being replaced with the FlashSystem family. For the 5000 range, this really is a name change, since we only updated the hardware during 2019, so... Continue Reading →
