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 And as of March 1, 2013 Licensed Machine Code (LMC) R6.2 of the DS8000 (DS8800 and DS8870) is withdrawn and replaced by LMC 6.3 (ZG13-0025).

IBM Storage announcements : IBM Smarter Storage

Today, IBM made a whole range of storage announcements around IBM Smarter Storage. It's way too extensive to cover everything so I'll just run you through some that caught my attention.

• Regarding software there's a couple of announcements for the new version 5 of Tivoli Storage Productivity Center : 'IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center V5.1 introduces a new user interface to help centralize, simplify, and automate storage tasks (ZP12-0243)' and IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication for System z V5.1 (ZP12-0185). Here's a (very!) short resume of the new functionalities
• Integrated web-based user interface 
• Cognos-based custom reporting 
• Storage tiering optimization 
• Support for cloud storage management 
• Consolidated installer  

• There's RealTime Compression for StorWize V7000 and San Volume Controller (SVC) with the following announcements : 'IBM Storwize V7000 software V6.4.0 introduces Real-time Compression (ZP12-0234)' and 'IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller software V6.4.0 improves storage efficiency (ZP12-0235)'. This is compression on active primary data before they are written to disk. So, it operates immediately and unlike other technologies there is no post-processing where data is first written to disk and compressed afterwards on quiet moments. What do you win ?
• Storage purchase costs 
• Rack space 
• Power and cooling 
• Software costs 

• There are some interesting Statements of Direction (SODs) : 'Statement of direction: IBM DS8000 series, SONAS, XIV , and Storwize V7000 Unified (ZG12-0163)'.
  Focusing mainly on the DS8000, some highlights : 
• DS8000 Easy Tier extended to server based storage : Easy Tier will extend smart data placement intelligence to use server resources, communicating with servers to place hot data in server SSD cache to reduce latency and further optimize performance
• DS8000 new high-density flash storage option : DS8000 and other IBM storage systems will use fast, high-density SSD cache modules to enhance performance. As put on another IBM page :  "a new 400GB SSD option provides additional flexibility for performance-intensive applications".
• DS8000 Easy Tier support for application API : Easy Tier will use an API to enable servers to communicate with storage so storage can become aware of application workload needs and use that to optimize data placement

There's also good news for XIV about migrating from one system to another : "IBM intends to support an increased scalability of capacity, performance, and host bandwidth by clustering IBM XIV Gen3 systems together and providing the capability to migrate volumes across the cluster without disrupting applications. Management of the cluster will remain simple with consolidated views and shared configurations across the systems". 

There's more information on other announcements on the IBM Smarter Storage page which you find over here.

IBM Real-time compression

If I got this correctly this is how it went :

• IBM develops a storage product, tries to find a name for it and finds out the name is already taken by another company
• In the mean time IBM is interested in the compression technology of Storwize and takes over the company
• Hey, Storwize was the name they had in mind from the beginning for their newly developped product. Now they can actually use this name
• IBM launches StorWize V7000 and guess what, this has absolutely nothing to do with the former Storwize real-time compression.
• What about the former Storwize realtime compression then ? Well, how about a new name for this one : IBM real-time compression. What do you think of that ? A new name for the product formerly known as Storwize (*) which has absolutley nothing to do with the new Storwize. Got it ?

So IBM has made two announcements lately on real-time compression : 'IBM Real-time Compression Appliance supports IBM Compression Software (ZG10-0406)' and 'IBM Compression Software provides Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) function for the IBM Real-time Compression Appliance (ZP10-0587)'.

This is some information you can find on the IBM Real-time compression Appliance STN6500 page :

"IBM Real-time Compression is a new storage efficiency solution for primary, active data

IBM Real-time Compression Appliances are the only storage compression solutions that can shrink primary, online data in real time, without performance degradation. By significantly reducing storage requirements, organizations can keep up to five times more information online for analytics, use the improved efficiency to reduce storage costs, or achieve a combination of greater capacity and reduced cost.

By transparently compressing primary data by up to 80 percent, IBM Real-time Compression helps control the growth of storage, reducing the amount of storage to be managed, powered and cooled".

You can find more information on the IBM Real-time compression page and (why not) on the former Storwize site. Or here's a nice introductory video, too :



(*) OK, for those not getting the reference : still remaining a Prince fan too. Prince refused to use his name for a couple of years due to troubles with record companies. So, people referred to him as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince or TAFKAP. Confusing ? Not at all !