Barry Whyte and Andrew Martin : IBM Storage

Previous Posts

  • Location does sometimes matter

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 5th February 2008 10,102 views on developerworks One of my regular blog stops is over at Techworld where Chris Mellor discusses all things storage. I spotted an interesting post from Chris today comparing SVC to USP and coming up with the conclusion that the two are almost the same in what they can achieve, what they do and at a 40,000ft view, how they do it. I came to a similar conclusion last year in my multi-part-work discussing Storage Virtualization (as we know it today). I’d agree that the differences between what an appliance and what a virtualizing… [Read More]

    Location does sometimes matter

  • Can’t wait for the excuses

    So before Mr Burke, Chuck or the zilla get in there with the excuses let me have a guess at what’s coming : They deliberately mis-configured it Its not a true comparison Its not a real life workload Its all about the number of drives color=greenad infinitum… I am of course talking about the latest batch of SPC-1 benchmarks, as discussed by Tony, and over at DrunkenData. It’s true, Chuck did give the go ahead for anyone to ‘lash up’ their EMC boxes and spin them at SPC, hats off to Net-app for going ahead and doing it, erm ‘sponsoring’… [Read More]

  • One box fits all – or does it? A discussion of tiering.

    ORIGINALLY POSTED January 21st 2008 13,232 views on developerworks I’m in the middle of another take on the – Why Virtualize? story – looking at it from a subtly different angle – more of that later this week hopefully. But I have to quickly delve a little bit deeper into the concept of effective Tiering. Flash based disks have been a tantalizing prospect up until now, and we all knew that once someone worked around the poor write performance / reliability issues then it would be a game changer in the longer term. Its almost like these disks have more… [Read More]

    One box fits all – or does it? A discussion of tiering.

  • Productivity Center 3.3, Striping and Performance

    ORIGINALLY POSTED January 10th 2008 10,649 views on developerwortks I’d mentioned we (the SVC performance team) have a few bits of fine tuning and investigations to perform for the next (4.3.0) release of SVC. This is the part of my job that I enjoy the most, getting the latest builds from development and putting them through their paces, drilling into the running software to find where those extra few tweaks will give just that bit more performance, or even determine where things can be reworked to provide real life improvements. I even managed to write some code at the tail… [Read More]

    Productivity Center 3.3, Striping and Performance

  • (2007) Seasons Wishes to you all

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 21st Decvember 2007 10,182 views on developerworks The house is feeling quite Christmas-e, with the tree and lights having been up for a few weeks, the collection of presents under the tree growing and the usual ‘spring cleaning’ sessions before the big day. One more day to go, and yet another working year draws to a close. I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on what we’d achieved this year with SVC and the labs. The first real visible accomplishment was the 4.2.0 code release back in June, which added support for the next generation 2145-8G4… [Read More]

  • Deja-vu – Invista 2 – again?!

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 15th December 2007 7,792 views on developerworks Back in August I posted about the ‘Stealth’ announcement of Invista 2.0. It seems that our friends over at EMC decided that after almost 6 months, they’d try again and actually tell the world this time. I thought I’d wait till the end of the week to see if the rest of the marketing, analyists and bloggers out there were as under-whelmed as I was when I actually saw the announce which we’d heard was coming on Monday. Are they going to embed Kashya in the product, are they going to… [Read More]

    Deja-vu – Invista 2 – again?!

  • Vanilla Windows vs Embedded Windows

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 5th December 2007 8,268 views on developerworks I guess I didn’t really get the message across in my previous post, well certainly not in the way I inteded from the emails and comments here. The main point I was making was with respect to using a “vanilla” Windows install as the base operating system for a storage product, in particular one in which all your SAN traffic flows through – lose it and lose access. What I meant was an install it yourself from CD, install all the service packs, download all the security patches, setup a firewall… [Read More]

    Vanilla Windows vs Embedded Windows

  • Would you trust Windows to Virtualize your Storage?

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 2nd December 2007 12,831 views on developerworks Back in June Chris Mellor stirred up a few people by suggesting that an unnamed source (I’m guessing someone at DataCore with a chip on their shoulder) was claiming IBM and HDS stole, or even reverse engineered the product to produce our respective SVC and USP products. Tony Pearson quite clearly outlined why this was not the case. I can back up his comments from experience as I was part of the SVC Architecture team around the millennium when SVC had been solidified into a product and the “Storage Software Group”… [Read More]

    Would you trust Windows to Virtualize your Storage?

  • What’s wrong with Storage Virtualization 1.0?

    ORIGINALLY POSTED 30th November 2007 12,255 views on developerworks I can’t help it. It seems that every post that Mr Yoshida makes strikes me as being somewhat questionable. I have much respect for how long he has been in the blogging game. I have no respect for his lack of reader comment acceptance – I’ve long since given up replying as he decides to ignore those that he doesn’t like – maybe they make too much sense… Anyway, I see over in Hu’s World he’s trying to suggest that Hitachi are ahead of the game releasing their version 2 of… [Read More]

    What’s wrong with Storage Virtualization 1.0?