Announcement : DS8000 New Functionalities

IBM has made quite a few announcements today on various matters. Some of them are about the DS8000, some others on the DS6000 and I also briefly mention the DS4000 - but for a good reason.

Let's first focus on the DS8000. IBM is announcing it’s second major enhancements to the DS8000. After the intial announcement, the Turbo Models were the first major enhancement. Since the new turbo models announcements are duplicated. New functionalities are announced for the DS8000 2107 and for the DS8000 242x series. The same for the new FlashCopy SE functionality (1,2).

The announcement is built up around two major themes : Performance on the one hand and Simplification and (cost) efficiency on the other hand. I’m going to give a brief description of these new functions.

Performance

• Storage Pool Striping
  It is now possible to stripe a volume’s data across arrays in the storage pool. This should optimize the performance. This is done by choosing the ‘Rotate Extents’ option at volume allocation instead of the current default (Rotate LUNs).
• z/OS Global Mirror Multiple Reader
  This function increases parallellism in processing I/Os and improves throughput for IBM z/OS Global Mirror.

Simplification and efficiency

• IBM FlashCopy SE
  FlashCopy SE stands for Space Efficient FlashCopy and fullfills a statement of direction lots of people have been asking for and that’s been lingering for quite some time now. This should significantly reduce the disk capacity needed for copies and it only uses space to save source data being updated. You no longer need a full match between source and target volumes. Most FlashCopy functions are available with FlashCopy SE. Exceptions for the moment are e.g. Dataset FlashCopy and Full Volume Copy.
  FlashCopy SE is separately licensed next to FlashCopy. Licenses are independent of one another.
• Dynamic Volume Expansion
  You no longer need to delete and re-create a volume to expand it.
• ‘Expansion frame’ warranty intermix
  Expansion frames can from now on have a warranty type (1,2,3 or4 years) independent of the base frame warranty.
• New SSL broadband option for Call Home
  This secure protocol is used for data offload and problem reporting only. It provides quicker debug times than a modem and requires minimal firewall setup at the customer site.
• DS Storage Manager Enhancements
  Based on a large study IBM has improved the functionality and the user interface should be faster and easier to use. This means faster respons time, improved flows, better graphics . . .
  
• Support for System Storage Productivity Center (SSPC)
  I'll come back to this in a follow-up post as there have been some separate announcements regarding Totalstorage Productivity Center and this new SSPC concept.
  

Another functionality people have been asking for is Raid 6. Raid 6 is not in the announcement, but it has been announced for the DS4700, the midrange disk storage solution of IBM. Maybe the DS4700 is the first one, and others will follow ?