ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 12th June 2015 Here's a quick one that I was reminded of today... The EasyTier 3 feature was introduced in 7.3.0.0 and introduced a number of new EasyTier features, but a few of them relied on knowledge of the maximum throughput and IOPs capability for each managed disk. On Storwize RAID arrays, this... Continue Reading →
SVC Standby Engine
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 6th July 2015 Hi again. I wanted to mention a feature that we released recently which we are calling the SVC Standby Engine. Unfortunately this feature is not available for Storwize systems, so it's probably not worth you reading this, but let me know if it's the kind of feature you would want... Continue Reading →
What do we mean when we talk about Clustering on the Storwize Products
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 9th October 2015 There's a particular business partner (I'll be shocked if he isn't the first person to comment on this post) who has asked for a "what is clustering" session at almost every one of the UK user groups for what seems like a couple of years now. I really couldn't see... Continue Reading →
Using EasyTier with Nearline Storage (and other ET tips)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 22nd October 2015 Hi, As more and more of you start to use Nearline storage in your EasyTier pools, there are a couple of scenarios which I would like to describe to you to help you avoid some pitfalls. Migrating from a single tier pool to a multi-tier pool containing Nearline. So you... Continue Reading →
Thin Provisioning – what should you think about from an operational point of view
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 27th May 2015 Thin provisioning is a well understood technology in the storage industry, but a surprising number of you haven't actually deployed it yet due to the "what-ifs" that keep you up at night. In this post I will hopefully give you a pointer to my thoughts about how you could address... Continue Reading →
Can you do Encryption as well as Compression
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 10th February 2016 Hi All, I got this question from a customer and thought it was worth a discussion. The short answer is yes you can perform both compression and encryption on data - as long as you do the steps in the correct order. The problem is that encrypted data is basically... Continue Reading →
Some details about how DRAID works
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 17th March 2016 Hi, There have been a number of DRAID questions on the forums recently, so we thought it was worth giving you some extra details about the benefits of DRAID. Ian Boden has provided the following information, and if you ask nicely he may come back and give us some more... Continue Reading →
RAID 5 Versus RAID 6
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 13th June 2016 Hi All, I was at the US user group last week - and this topic came up quite a lot. The main reason that we started discussing R5 versus R6 is because the development team are currently recommending that all Distributed RAID arrays be configured as R6, and people are... Continue Reading →
Performance optmization of Snapshots
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 15th June 2016 Hi All, I've been working with a customer and we've realised that our best practice for snapshots (or Thin provisioned FlashCopies with a background copy rate of zero) may have been slightly flawed. There is no functional impact to these changes- but we can make some small changes that will... Continue Reading →
DRAID 6 is the answer – what was the question
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 10th May 2017 Hi everyone, The last couple of days have been the UK user group again, and these interesting discussions always give me a number of new topics to talk about on the blog. The best quote from the User Group can be attributed to @barrywhyteibm "No matter what the question -... Continue Reading →
