Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • Introducing Spectrum Virtualize 8.3.1, FlashSystem 7200, 9200 and SVC Platform updates

    Hopefully by now you will have all seen the new updates across pretty much the whole Spectrum Virtualize Family. The new 8.3.1 software GA’d a week early on the 29th February 2020, and 8.3.1.1 is available for download. At the same time as I discussed in part 5 of my potted history partwork, the Storwize products are being replaced by FlashSystem products from the 5000 up to the 9000 series. We’ve also introduced two new SVC hardware platforms as well as refreshing the 7000 and 9000 product lines. In this post I will concentrate on the software updates included in… [Read More]

    Introducing Spectrum Virtualize 8.3.1, FlashSystem 7200, 9200 and SVC Platform updates

  • A Brief History of “recent” Time – Part 5

    2008-2020 The “Storwize” Years It seems fitting for my first officially new post on the new site to actually be a historical retrospective. At the same time however, it brings us right up the to recent IBM Storage annoucements made on 11th/12th February 2020. So its 2008, and for probably the previous decade the Hursley storage team had made various proposals for what we called an ‘organic IBM midrange controller’. There had been many ‘skunk works’ projects, most of which proved the design and architecture, but never made it out the lab – for various reasons – funding, politics, the… [Read More]

  • Welcome to the new home for “An Exchange and Discussion of Storage Virtualization” and “Musings of the Spectrum Virtualize Support Architect”

    “These aren’t the pages you are looking for”… If google brought you here from a link on the old sites, please use the local site search to find the post you were looking for… After over 12 years, and for the second time since I started blogging IBM has sunset the platform we were using for blogging. Andy and I decided to combine our forces and both be equally slack at regular posting, but at least in one place! Thanks to all of you for the support over the years, we have both finally finished re-publishing all the relevant content… [Read More]

  • IBM Systems TechU – Sydney October 15th-17th 2019

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 2nd October 2019 There is still time to register for this years A/NZ Systems Technical University. The event is running from the 15th to 17th October in Sydney, places are filling up fast so be sure to sign up today. In the last of my speaker focus posts, here is a round up of some of the global speakers covering general topics, and the remainder of the local speakers. We look forward to seeing you there ! Brian Sherman is a Distinguished Engineer with over thirty years experience as an I/T Specialist. Brian works directly with clients in solving storage related challenges. Brian has extensive… [Read More]

    IBM Systems TechU – Sydney October 15th-17th 2019

  • IBM Systems TechU – Sydney October 2019 – Spectrum Scale

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 13th September 2019 This week its the turn of our unstructured data products. At TechU in Sydney we will have Chris Maestas flying in to cover most of the Spectrum Scale topics. For those that don’t know Chris, here is is bio : Christopher D. Maestas is an Executive Architect for IBM File and Object Storage Solutions with over 20 years of experience deploying and designing IT systems for clients in various spaces. He has experience scaling performance and availability with a variety of file systems technologies. He has developed benchmark frameworks to test out systems for reliability… [Read More]

    IBM Systems TechU – Sydney October 2019 – Spectrum Scale

  • IBM Systems TechU – Sydney October 2019 – Spectrum Protect/Plus

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 5th September 2019 Following on from last weeks post where I listed the Spectrum Virtualize sessions we will be covering at the Sydney Technical University, I thought it would be good to showcase the other international speaker, and of course the local speakers that will be attending the event. Today its the Spectrum Protect Plus sessions, covering critical topics for maximising and modernising data retention, copy data management and traditional backup. Harley Puckett will be presenting the sessions below. I’ve known Harley for almost 10 years, as we regularly attend the Nordic Spectrum Storage user groups in Norway,… [Read More]

    IBM Systems TechU – Sydney October 2019 – Spectrum Protect/Plus

  • IBM Systems TechU – Sydney October 2019 – Spectrum Virtualize

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 27th August 2019 NOTE: I haven’t cloned the other posts relating to the numeours events over the years, but since these posts contain bio info for some of the presenters, I figured they were worth keeping. IBM Systems – Technical University Sydney Australia – October 15th to 17th Come and join us for 3 days of technical learning, I will be presenting with Andrew Martin from the Hursley lab on the following topics : s111115 Spectrum Virtualize : NPIV, and Object Based Access Control s111116 Spectrum Virtualize : Recent Family Updates s111113 Spectrum Virtualize : Effective Use of… [Read More]

  • Auto-negotiation with Fibre Channel speeds

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 31st May 2019 I had a recent question from within IBM regarding our support for auto-negotiation of Fibre Channel speed. It seems we take this for granted, because we don’t specifically mention that all our Fibre Channel HBA’s across all the Virtualize family have supported auto-negotiate since our 4Gbit HBA back in 2005! To be clear, across IBM Storwize V5000 series (all generations), IBM Stortwize V7000 series (all generations), IBM FlashSystem 9100 series and IBM SVC (since 8F4 nodes) the various Fibre Channel Host attachment interfaces will auto-negotiate with the switch to find the fastest commonly supported speed.… [Read More]

    Auto-negotiation with Fibre Channel speeds

  • NVMe Flash-Core-Module value for all. Introducing the next gen IBM Storwize V5000 and Spectrum Virtualize 8.3.0

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 3rd April 2019 It’s almost scary that we are already 1/4 of the way through 2019… where does the time go. I’ve been even more remiss than usual on posting… I guess you’ve come to expect that now, but I have excuses, with multiple trips in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Switzerland in the last few weeks, as well as a much needed break over the summer months to recharge. Over the next few weeks the travel doesn’t relent, I am over in the UK for the Virtualize User Group sessions running next week, the TechU in Atlanta at… [Read More]