IBM XIV Storage System Model 214

You must have noticed there weren't a lot of announcements lately. Well, usually that only means that one of those big announcement days is imminent. So, yesterday, next to the previews of z/OS 2.1 and z/VM 6.3 there were also some storage announcements. Two of them were about XIV.

The first one was the hardware announcement of Model 214 (ZG13-0019) which is the third in line after the A14 and the 114 (Gen3). The second one announced the accompanying software version 11.2.0 (ZP13-0018) supporting the new model 214 and the current model 114.

There's not that many new items that were announced. The most important one is that we do not only have just 1Gb Ethernet ports any more. We can now have up to twelve 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports for connecting to iSCSI-attached hosts or twenty-two 1Gb Ethernet ports.

Some other highlights (although most of them are not actually new)

• Up to 15 CPUs providing ninety physical cores (180 logical cores using Intel Hyper-Threading technology)
• More energy-efficient hardware that can reduce power consumption by up to 16% compared to previous models
• Up to 24 x 8Gb FC ports for host connectivity
• Up to 6 TB of SSD cache by using 400 GB drives
• Up to 243 TB of usable capacity
• Up to 360 GB of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) cache

There are some key prerequisites although you'd perhaps better call them limitations.

• Intermixing of port bandwidth between 10GbE and 1Gb within the same system is not supported (mutually exclusive)
• Partially populated IBM XIV Storage Systems that are shipped from the factory with any of the raw capacity per drive options must continue to be populated with the same raw capacity per drive option.
• Intermixing of any of these capacity points options in a single XIV Storage System frame is not allowed: 1 TB, 2 TB, or 3 TB.
• If one module supports SSD caching, then all modules in the system must have SSD.

Planned availability : March 7, 2013.

Next to the XIV, there were also some announcements on ProtecTIER (ZP13-0007, ZP13-0009) and Real-Time Compression (ZP13-0017, ZG13-0018). And as of March 1, 2013 Licensed Machine Code (LMC) R6.2 of the DS8000 (DS8800 and DS8870) is withdrawn and replaced by LMC 6.3 (ZG13-0025).