Introduction of IBM XIV Gen3 Storage System Model 314

Last week on December 4, 2015 IBM XIV Gen3 Model 314 became available. It was announced last month with a software (ZP15-0616) and a hardware announcement 'IBM XIV Storage System Model 314 delivers Real-time Compression with larger effective capacity and better performance' (ZG15-0268).

As you can see in the title of the announcement the focus is on the improvement of the Real-time Compression. It's the same RACE technology we also find in other IBM storage devives or SDS. How is it possible that this compression has little or no impact on the performance. Well, quite some extra capacity is reserved for the compression only. Here's a couple of specs.

"IBM XIV Storage System Gen3 Model 314 delivers:

• 2 x 6-core CPUs per module (versus 1 x 6-core CPU per module in Model 214) with 1 x 6-core CPU dedicated to Real-time Compression
• 96 GB RAM per module (versus 48 GB RAM per module in Model 214) with 48 GB of RAM dedicated to Real-time-Compression
• 1 to 2 PB of effective capacity without performance degradation
• Improved IOPS per compressed capacity
• User-configurable soft capacity up to 2 PB
• Reduced minimum compressible volume size from 103 GB to 51 GB"

The bold is mine indicating that the processing power has doubled but the extra power is dedicated to the Real-time Compression. You can also deduce from this that the Real-time Compression is executed by each of the 15 modules containing the RACE engine. Another implication is that you always have to include the SSD Flash Cache 'option' that has become mandatory on this model. And as you can see from the picture below, the compression is done before the data is put into the cache and SSD and is decompressed after it leaves them. Also data which is mirrored remains compressed, saving some bandwidth.

 And here are the workloads that benefit the most from compression.

Some documentation
First of all there's the IBM XIV page giving you lots of information on XIV. Mind you there are tabs (overview, product details, resources) and subtabs on that page.
if you want a general introduction on XIV, you can still download our RealDolmen XIV information brochure over here. it doesn't cover the newest stuff on the 314 model.
But hey, don't worry, there's a great presentation (ànd replay) available on the ATS site covering all this including the new features of IBM Spectrum Accelerate which is the Software Defined version of XIV.
And to conclude, here's a 100-page Redpaper on Real-time Compression : 'Implementing IBM Real-time Compression on the IBM XIV Storage System'.

#XIV - Roundup of our executive briefing and Accelerate with ATS

Yesterday we had our Executive Briefing on XIV with an introduction from Eyal Zimran (CTO Storage IBM Europe) and a customer testimonial from Colruyt, an XIV customer of ours. And I can tell you, this was the most convincing part of the seminar. Let me give you a couple of quotes from their presentation

• They came from DS8000 and the only thing they could conclude is that for their distributed systems, the performance of the XIV was way better than what they achieved with the DS8000.

• The slide I liked the most was the one that wasn't there : Management. Since their statement was that this box absolutely has NO management effort whatsoever, the only thing they could've done was adding an empty slide on Management. 

• And this also struck me : the savings they had on energy alone already paid back their investment

And, as you know, the customer is always right !

If you want to catch up with the most recent evolutions on XIV, here's your chance with a new 'Accelerate with ATS' teleconference. The content : "There are enhancements to how we view XIV Snapshot utilization that we would like to present. And we will also discuss the recent XIV announcements of 6TB drives, support for VMware VVOLs, and XIV Energy Star certification".

It's on June 18, 2015 at 6.00PM Brussels Time. Details and registration over here.

IBM #XIV introduces Real-time Compression

Last week IBM made a significant announcement on XIV Gen3 : ' IBM XIV Storage System Gen3 and IBM XIV Cloud Storage for Service Providers V11.6.0 deliver support for IBM Real-time Compression and disaster recovery with Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ZP15-0250)'.

Highlights
I think the real eye-catcher over here is the introduction of Real-time Compression. This is reflected in the overview of what's announced :

• IBM Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) technology without need for extra hardware to scale performance and simplify compression management
• Increased usable capacity per rack to lower cost per capacity
• Faster replication of compressed data using less bandwidth to free up bandwidth for other uses
• Continuous display of predicted or actual compression ratios for all volumes to increase performance
• Nondisruptive conversion of uncompressed volumes to compressed volumes for faster data mobilization
• Support for Microsoft™ Azure Site Recovery to seamlessly manage XIV replication for Microsoft infrastructures

Double your capacity ?
What does this mean in terms of usable capacity. Well : here's the maximum capacity for an XIV with 180 disks and disks of 1TB/2TB/3TB/4TB/6TB : 80TB/161TB/243TB/325TB/485TB (decimal TB that is). The announcement says this will "increase usable capacity per rack typically to one petabyte or more with IBM Real-time Compression™ (using a 15-module system with 6 TB disk drives)". Of course, as always, results will vary, but let's say capacity could be doubled with this inline compression.

Requirements/limitations
"IBM Real-time Compression is a software license option that is only available for XIV Gen3 systems, including models 114 and 214, with XIV software V11.6.0, on new systems, or as an MES upgrade". "Compression is applied to individual volumes and snapshots. There is no limit however on the amount of usable capacity that is subject to compression. Compression need to be system-enabled before it can be applied to individual volumes. Mirroring requires that both primary and secondary volumes are compressed".

Trial
"IBM is offering current IBM Storage XIV Gen3 customers the opportunity to evaluate the new Real-time Compression capability at no cost for 45 days. (...) The 45-day evaluation period begins when the XIV Real-time Compression function is enabled. At the end of the evaluation period, customers must either purchase the required licenses for Real-time Compression or disable the function".

Pricing
Did I see the word "purchase" over there ? Yes, Real-time Comrpession seems to be the first license on the XIV that does not come for free with the box. I must say that for the moment I haven't got any clue about the price setting of this feature. 

Redbook
There's a nice little Redpaper called 'IBM Real-time Compression on the IBM XIV Storage System' available on the Redbooks site.

Planned Availability  is June 4, 2015.

Introduction to the value of IBM XIV - a RealDolmen publication

I already told you about our XIV Roundtable event on Tuesday 2, 2015 but we also took some other initiatives to put IBM XIV into the spotlights.

One of those was composing an introductory brochure to XIV and particularly to the value of XIV for your business.  It was a challenging but rewarding effort, summarizing lots of presentations, studies, white papers and so forth into a 24-page brochure. But I think we came out with a great result. As you can see, we grouped everything around six themes : Elasticity, Security&Continuity, Efficiency, Manageability, Performance and Out-of-the-box Integration. 

But bottom line, you know, is most of the time the impact all this has on the cost for your business and we also payed quite some attention to this.

If you want to download this brochure, you can find it via the registration page of the Roundtable event over here : 'Powerful storage with IBM XIV'.

Invitation to our Executive Roundtable on IBM XIV storage

You must know by now, I've always had a soft spot for XIV. I've already told you about recent evolutions and how IBM Spectrum Accelerate is the newly announced Software Defined Storage (SDS) version of XIV.

So I'm really proud to tell you that RealDolmen is launching an intensive campaign to promote IBM XIV and IBM Spectrum Accelerate in the BeLux market. One of our initiatives is an Executive Roundtable on Tuesday June 2, 2015 at De Montil in Affligem (BE) near Brussels. And I must say we have a very strong agenda giving you lots of inormation in just half a day including a compelling customer story by Colruyt, one of the largest retail companies in Belgium. Here's the full agenda :

9.00 - 9.30	Reception (Coffee)
9.30 - 9.45	Storage: A challenge for you as well ? RealDolmen
9.45 -11.15	IBM XIV: IBM’s anwer for your storage needs Overview Market and Architecture What's new with XIV 11.6 XIV and VMware Spectrum Accelerate Roadmap Eyal Zimran, Chief Technology Officer, IBM
11.15 - 11.30	Pause
11.30 -12.15	IBM XIV at Colruyt: a customer testimonial Robert Groenemans, Team manager Server Platforms, Colruyt Sten Leijskens, Infrastructure Manager Infrastructure Services, Colruyt
12.15 – 12.30	What can RealDolmen do for your with regards to your XIV storage projects ?    -    ReaDolmen
12.30 -	Q&A followed by businesslunch offered by RealDolmen

If you want to subscribe to this event or you think your manager should, then you can register over here. For the moment I only have the Dutch registration page link, but I'll add the French link later on.

If you have any more questions about this event or if you want us to contact you about IBM XIV storage, just let me know. You can always mail me at marc.wambeke@realdolmen.com.

Accelerate with ATS : What’s new with XIV - IBM Spectrum Accelerate

Here's another interesting webcast communicated via the Accelerate with ATS blog about XIV and its newly announced SDS version : IBM Spectrum Accelerate.

The webcast will focus on this IBM Spectrum Accelerate, "a software defined storage offering (...) based on our proven XIV integrated storage system. The same ease of management with the XIV GUI, the same hotspot-free performance, predictable scaling, enterprise capabilities such as remote mirroring and flash caching, and much more".

In short IBM Spectrum Accelerate is the very same software that runs on the XIV box, but as a customer you can (within some boudaries) decide which hardware you put underneath it. You get all the advantages and functionalities as with an XIV box, but you can create a smaller entry point starting from just a few x86 servers.

Let me give you some technical requirements :

Hardware requirements
x86 servers running VMware ESX Hypervisor with a VM configured according to the following specifications.

Minimal VM requirements:
CPU cores: 4 nonvirtualized CPU cores
Memory: 24 GB physical memory
Network: 2x 10 GbE ports
Disks: 6 to 12 hard-drives, 1, 2, 3, or 4 TB in size
SSD (optional): One 500 GB or 800 GB SSD

Recommended VM requirements:
CPU cores: 4 nonvirtualized CPU cores
Memory: 48 GB physical memory
Network: 4 to 8 10 GbE ports
Disks: 6 to 12 hard-drives, 2, 3, or 4 TB in size
SSD: One 800 GB SSD

Software requirements
VMware ESX v5.5 only, is required on every node.

Be sure to follow this webcast to put this in the right perspective :
Date: Thursday March 26th 2015
Time: Noon New York, 5 p.m. London, 6 p.m. Brussels, 17:00:00 GMT
Duration: 1.5 hours

Register over here.

IBM XIV Storage System support for vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOL)

I already told you some time ago that my action radius has become a bit larger than just mainframe. So, as a technical presales I'm also covering the entire IBM System Storage spectrum. Hey, we're not that big ! Of course, I'm mainly focusing on the high end market and so XIV and e.g. Flash are likely candidates to have my full attention.

So, about a week ago I wrote about a new XIV announcement and about the support for vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOL). And now here's a video by IBM Redbooks specifically about this. If you're even slightly interested, have a look. It not only shows the ease of use of the XIV but also what VVOLs are and how they are supported by XIV.



And as I told you last time, at RealDolmen we will have a firm focus on XIV in the coming months. So, stay tuned for more communications, news and events from our part in the near future . . .

XIV - 6TB drives and VMWare Virtual Volumes

Yesterday, IBM made two announcements about XIV. There's a hardware announcement 'IBM XIV Storage System Gen3 Model 214 with software version 11.5.1 delivers support for 6 TB self-encrypted drives (ZG15-0037)' and a software announcement : 'IBM XIV Storage System Gen3 and IBM XIV Cloud Storage for Service Providers V11.5.1 deliver support for 6 TB self-encrypted drives and VMware Virtual Volumes (ZP15-0091).

It's been a while since I wrote about XIV, but I'm going to try and pick up the pace here as well. If there's one product acquisition IBM hit the bull's eye with then, to me, it was definitely XIV. I still find this a marvellous product. Just to give you a couple of examples : the data are spread alike over all disks making tiering absolutely superfluous. And this without having to do any concessions with regards to performance. Another example : there's quite some talk about rebuild times in Raid configurations especially when we each time get larger disks. Well did you know that XIV never had this problem and even with the new 6TB drives it achieves an average rebuild time of under the hour for a 6TB disk.

What's new today ? Well, as I already mentioned : XIV now supports 6TB disks. This gives us a maximum capacity of 485TB as compared to 325TB with the 4TB disks. However performance levels are sustained with these larger disks.
Next to that XIV now also has the Energy Star certification. You can find more information about Energy Star over here. If you're interested in the XIV data, go over here, click on 'filter' and add a filter with 'Model name' equals 'XIV'.
Another important item is built-in XIV support for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOL). "VVOL are designed to enable upcoming VMware vSphere environments to easily automate XIV provisioning, offload snapshots and cloning, and instantly reclaim space, all at the virtual-machine level. Systems will benefit from XIV hotspot-free performance predictability and extreme capacity utilization, delivered efficiently through the IBM Storage Integration Server". As 70% of XIV customers are Vmware users this can have a great impact on most of the XIV customers.
For more information, here's a solution overview to VMWare's Virtual Volumes.

Planned availability is February 12, 2015.

By the way, if you're interested in XIV and you want to find out what RealDolmen can do for you in this area, be sure to come back here regularly. There's definitely more to follow about XIV in the coming weeks, months . . .

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).

The 500TB Question

Just a teaser for my next post

IBM Summer Announcements : Storage : StorWize and XIV

This summer there were storage announcements about StorWize and XIV.

About StorWize, as mentioned in announcement 'Hardware withdrawal: Select drive features for IBM Storwize V7000 - Replacements available (ZG12-0187)', effective August 18, 2012, the 300GB 2.5-inch E-MLC SSD drive is replaced by 200GB or 400GB 2.5-inch E-MLC SSD drives. Also 300GB, 450GB, 600GB and 900GB 2.5-inch 10k RPM SAS HDD drives are replaced by 6Gb 2.5-inch 10K RPM SFF HDD drives effective October 27, 2012. You can find out more about these new drives in 'IBM Storwize V7000 introduces new 300 GB, 600 GB, and 900 GB SAS drives (ZG12-0188)'.

About XIV,  the announcement 'Hardware withdrawal: IBM 2810 XIV Storage System Model A14 and IBM 2812 XIV Storage System Model A14 - Replacements available (ZG12-0203)' indicates that from October 26, 2012 Gen2 models can no longer be ordered. Only Gen3 models remain available. Two other announcements (ZG12-0224 and ZP12-0324) offer some new functionalities for Gen3 :

• "1 TB raw capacity per drive option: XIV now supports configurations as small as 27 TB of usable storage making it a viable option for customers with smaller capacity needs.
• XIV USGv6 certification: The enhanced security available with IPv6 is of particular interest to enterprise customers that adopted IPv6., such as federal agencies.
• SCVMM: Microsoft Hyper-V customers using XIV can now manage XIV storage through the standard Hyper-V tools for managing Virtual Machines for increased ease of management".

Then there's one more announcement about the XIV (ZG12-0226) stating that "effective July 24, 2012, new purchases of IBM XIV Storage System machine type 2812 models 114 and A14, will include both a 3-year hardware warranty period and 3-year warranty for XIV Software Maintenance. Customers who desire longer than 3-years software maintenance contracts will be able to purchase the 3-year hardware warranty period with 4- or 5-year software maintenance". I'm not really sure how to interpret this because as far as I know this already was the case in the past. It seems more likely IBM deleted the option of ordering 1 or 2 years of software warranty with this box of 3 years hardware maintenance. Correct me if I'm wrong !

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.

Sampling Techdocs - February-April 2012

It's been a while, but here I am again with another overview of interesting TechDocs documents I came across while browsing through the latest publications. If you're completely unfamiliar to Techdocs, here's an introduction to it. I've tried to group them a bit.

Let's start with XIV

• Presentation : Accelerate with ATS: Introducing IBM XIV Gen 3
  A good introduction to XIV Gen3 (audio included as well) with a technical update and some performance data included.

• Presentation : Accelerate with ATS: XIV Storage System Update
  This presentation gives an overview of XIV Gen 3 R3.1 with a focus on the new SSD caching functionalities.

• White paper : IBM® System Storage™ XIV™ Performance Whitepaper
  Nice performance white paper for XIV Gen 3. Not yet including SSD disks or SSD caching.

Here are some documents on Oracle and Oracle consolidation

• FAQ : Oracle certification metrics
  Where can I find the latest certification matrix for Oracle products ?

• Presentation : Oracle Technology List of Redbooks
  Nice list of RedBooks on Oracle consolidation. Examples : Experiences with Oracle Database 10g on Linux for zSeries, Experiences with Oracle 10gR2 Solutions on Linux for System z, but there are more. Do have a look ! And very similar to this, there's also a List of White Papers on Oracle.

• Technical Document : IBM Sizing Questionnaires for Oracle Database
  A couple of questionnaires that can help to document a (planned) customer environment.

But there's more

• FAQ : z/OS Statement of Direction FAQ
  This tells about the same as I did in a previous post, but it's a more official IBM document, which might come in handy.

• Presentations : z/OS Performance HOT Topics Presentation
  This is a share presentation from the Share Winter 2012 Conference in Atlanta. "This session at the Atlanta SHARE covered the latest performance and capacity planning information for System z and z/OS". There are of course a lot more Share presentations, but you know where to find those.

• Workshop materials : zEnterprise zManager Workshop
  I've mentioned this one before, but apparantly the materials have been updated : This is the material from one of the WildfireWorkshops on System z Unified Resource Manager. It's mainly the presentations of course (with or without the speaker notes). Topics covered are : Introduction&Overview, Platform Performance Management and usage scenarios.

Well that's it for now. And, as I always say : just check them out !

February Storage announcements

Last week there were also some storage announcements. The most important ones were about Gen 3 of XIV : 'IBM XIV Storage System Gen3 with software release 11.1 offers optional SSD caching (ZG12-0039)' and 'IBM XIV Storage System Gen3 Software Version 11.1.0 supports SSD caching and multi-system management enhancements, and IBM XIV Storage System Software Version 10.2.4.e offers cross-generation mirroring (ZP12-0046)'.

In short for XIV Gen 3.1 there are the following new features :

• SSD Caching. Should increases read performance considerably
• XIV Mobile (monitor) Dashboard for iPhone
• Cross-generation mirroring between all XIV models
• Management UI Enhancements

The most important feature of XIV Gen 3.1 is of course the introduction of SSD read cache. You know how each XIV module contains its own disks, cache, CPU and possibly interface components. To each module you can now add 400GB of SSD cache. That means that for e.g. 6 modules you can have 400GB x 6 = 2.4TB of read cache. This should give your read performance an extra boost. The Storage Buddhist compares it to NetApp Flash Cache and I guess that's a pretty good comparison since Flash Cache is also meant to boost read performance.

Next to the XIV announcement Tony Pearson also mentions some other ones on his Inside System Storage blog. I'm not sure why, but I can't find any 'real' announcement about it. IBM Tape storage policy normally offers reading N-2 generations and writing N-1 generations. The reading part is now extended to N-3. I'm not going to sum up all possibilities. Just look at the picture below. The red box should no longer be grayed out but for the moment I have no real details about how it should be filled in.
Just click on the image for a larger version.

I already mentioned two fellow bloggers writing about these announcements. But I should add another one writing extensively about them. It's Anthony Vandewerdt on his Aussi Storage Blog with 'XIV Release 3.1 – SSD Read Cache is go!' and 'XIV Release 3.1 materials' including a video on the XIV iPhone App.

2011Q4 IBM Storage announcements

OK, now continuing with the rest of the storage announcements. I Hope I get it right this time because some of you might've received an incomplete feed.

I'll just give you an overview of some announcements and give some brief information on them.

IBM XIV Storage System Gen3 offers new 3 TB SAS drive feature (ZG11-0317) and
IBM XIV Storage System Software Version 11.0.1 (5639-YYB) supports 3 TB SAS drives (ZG11-0506)
IBM XIV now support 3TB SAS drives. This increases the maximum capacity from 161 TB to 243 TB. Some limitations : no intermix with 2 TB and no field upgrades from 2 TB to 3 TB. Drive encryption is not supported on these drives.
And, as I've already mentioned before, there's a new, free of charge, monitoring XIV Mobile Dashboard app for Apple iPad devices.
The datasheet on the XIV IBM page has also already been updated.

StorWize seems to have become IBMs showpiece for midsized clients in just one year. There are four announcements (ZG11-0291, ZG11-0516, ZG11-0525, ZG11,0276) covering all enhancements to the StorWize system.
We have additional drives : 3 TB 3.5-inch 7.2k rpm Nearline SAS HDD, 200 GB 2.5-inch E-MLC SSD and 400 GB 2.5-inch E-MLC SSD.
The most eye-catching however is of course the announcement of the StorWize Unified system. V7000 Unified supports NFS/CIFS/FTP/HTTPS/SCP file protocols in addition to existing block protocols (iSCSI and FCP) and is managed through a unified management GUI.
There are also some mirroring enhancements with Low Bandwidth and Storwize V7000-SVC Mirroring.

IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller V6.3.0 offers enhanced data mobility for high availability and introduces IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Select V4.2.2 (ZP11-0464).
The highlights :

• Lower-bandwidth option for Global Mirror
• Mirroring from SVC to Storwize V7000
• Stretch cluster enhanced from 10km to 300km maximum

Next to that there are some more announcements on storage for open systems I'm less familiar with. I could mention SONAS and Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager V3.1 delivering data protection for VMware vSphere environments and Microsoft Windows NTFS support. But I think those who want to read more about this will surely find their way around the blogosphere for more info on these.

IBM XIV Mobile Dashboard for iPad

I was in doubt whether I would already post about this or not. I surely don't have the habit of writing about things before they're officially announced. I guess we all know about now a bunch of IBM announcements is coming our way next week, but it suprised me to see that some information is already mentioned on the internet. Have a look over here : I get the impression I just missed the z/VM 6.2 announcement as it says : "The major improvements offered by version 6.2 was support of clustering for up to four z/VM instances" and non-disruptive relocation of Linux guest environments.

And then I saw a tweet about this. You can already download this XIV Mobile Dashboard app for iPad from iTunes : IBM XIV Mobile Dashboard for iPad. Well it's such a nice pictures I just wanted to share them with you.




Reading the description, it looks like this is not the full management GUI but just an extra monitoring tool for iPad.

Oh well, more to come next week !

Some storage news

Here's some information I gathered on several storage topics.

• Last week IBM announced that theTS3400 tape library will be withdrawn from marketing. This is the small tape library with a maximum of two TS1120 drives and 18 cartridges which was announced in 2007. No replacement will be available.

• Data center storage trends 2010: What's hot and what's on the horizon. This is an informational article on SearchDataCenter.com on SSD's, storage tiering, sub-volume automization, thin provisioning and deduplication.

• Want to do some eLearning on ProtecTier. Here's the place to be with the following topics : Getting Started, LUN Masking, Virtual Tape Library and Replication

• The Storage Evaluation Tool. If you have no clue what storage best matches your requirements, you can try and use this tool. It's a kind of wizard guiding you through some questions to make up your profile. However, I would love to see some results from the tool as I just can't seem to get past the final fill out form. Hope you have more luck than I have. If you get stuck too, they're working on it !

• XIV customer story : here's a video on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange that implemented two full IBM XIV systems at each of two data centers, with synchronous mirroring for protection.
  

Reblogging on DB2, zIIP and XIV GUI

I thought I had come up with a new word, when I thought of reblogging. People who are familiar with Twitter, know you can retweet a tweet (message) some one else put on Twitter. I'm just trying not to be too obscure for non-twitter-ers. In fact, you just repeat a message by some one else because you think it might be interesting for your own followers. And if there's some space left, you can even add some comments.

So today I came across a couple of tweets referring to blog posts. As I really liked the blog posts, I retweeted those tweets, but then I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could also reblog the blog posts, referring to the original poster and adding some comments. I'm hoping this doesn't look to much like speech therapy or a poetic alliteration effort for people not familiar with these terms, but do read on, there's following some more familiar content.

So, it turns out that reblogging already exists and you can e.g. use it in between wordpress blogs. It's not supported between several types of blogs. So, here I go, the oldfashioned way.

The first blog post I want to mention is by Willie Favero : 'Improved zIIP redirect'. Willie tells about an APAR on DB2. It should allow you to improve the redirection of DRDA workload over TCP/IP to the zIIP from some 45%-50% to about 60%. If that ain't worth a reblog ?! Just go over there to read all the details. By the way, Willie will also be presenting at the Total Solutions Event in September at the IBM Forum in Brussels.

The second blog post is from Anthony Vandewerdt who works for IBM Australia as a Storage Solutions Specialist and who has a blog on System Storage. His post is about XIV : 'Even more praise for the XIV GUI'. It just gives you another illustration of how easy and how intuitive the User Interface for XIV is. And of how easily you can obtain status information from about any component in the machine, up to the fans. You'll also see that you can download the GUI, even if you don't have an XIV ... yet. So, just give it a try, you'll like it !

By the way, I won't be posting again before the end of next week. The children are doing their last exam today and tomorrow we're off to the city of angels and demons visiting my brother for an extended weekend.

Storage Announcements : XIV and Protectier

This week I already discussed the LTO5 and DS8700 announcements, but there're still some more : XIV and ProtecTIER. As I've already said, I've broadened my horizon a bit and I will also talk about high-end storage which is not always immediately mainframe-related. But we've already seen how thin this line can be. ProtecTIER already has a gateway for the mainframe and behind that you can also have an XIV. Though I must say, the new functionalities for ProtecTIER are open systems only for the moment as it's about the TS7650.

What's the main part of the ProtecTIER announcements (ZP10-0169 and ZP10-0172) ?
It's called many-to-one replication. It's for customers with backup data at multiple data centers, remote offices or multiple office locations. You can have up to twelve primary sites with a ProtecTIER solutions (called spokes) and have one central target (called hub). The twelve spokes replicate their virtual tapes (already deduplicated) to the hub. This hub acts as a Disaster/Recovery solution for all spokes. "It can become a 'primary' for any number of the spokes under disaster while still allowing local backups and replication from other active spokes". And as a picture tells more than a thousand words, here's schematic illustration you can also find when you take a look at the accompanying podcast. You can find the link on the ProtecTIER information page too.

Click on image to see larger version in new window

Planned availability : May 28, 2010

On to XIV with the 2TB drive support (ZP10-0080 and ZP10-0069). This is quite straightforward : it extends the maximum usable capacity from 79TB to 161TB for a full rack with 15 modules. But there's more good news : same footprint but less power consumption compared to a 1TB rack. And performance should remain roughly the same. Some resources : the XIV home page, the XIV fact sheet and the XIV 2TB launch page with some interesting links like customer references, testimonials and an introductory podcast.

Planned availability : April 22, 2010.

Short takes

Sometimes I'm making a couple of bookmarks thinking 'I'm going to blog on this'. But then I forget about it or there are other things to talk about. So here's an excellent opportunity to catch up on some of those and to mention some new, short messages.

• Doing this presales job for quite a few years now, I think my actual experience with DB2 is getting a bit rusty. Did you know there are 16 (yes 16) Explain Tables in DB2 for z/OS. Of course you did. Or, if you didn't, take a look at Willie Favero's blog post about it : 'Explaining the history of EXPLAIN tables' clarifying (pun intentionally avoided) it all to you.

• There was a z/VSE GSE meeting in Brussels at the end of last year with the two most renowned speakers (at least that I know of) on the subject : Klaus Goebel and Wilhem Mild. Here are there presentations :

  z/VSE in an Elevator - Dr. K. Goebel

  Modernization solutions with z/VSE - Dr. W. Mild

  What's new in z/VM and Linux - Dr. K Goebel

  Modern Application development environments for z/VSE - Dr. W. Mild

  z/VSE Pricing options - Dr. K Goebel

  SOA for z/VSE, Disaster Recovery Scenarios and tools - Dr. W. Mild

• On February 26, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM CST (7:00 PM Brussels Time there's a technical webinar on XIV. You can register over here. As a matter a fact it's already a second presentation on the topic. The page also mentions the first one which you can download from IBM's ftp site. It's this one : 20091118XIV_pt_1.wmv. If, just like me, you might have problems with the G2M3 codec in Windows Media Player, you can download it from the Citrix site.

• Here's one I've mentioned before : the z/OS Platform evaluation test team. They run the final verification tests on a z/OS release before it becomes GA. But more interesting : they gather their experiences and publish them. The publication usually comes a couple of months after the product goes GA. So late december they published 'z/OS V1R11.0 System z Platform Test Report for z/OS and Linux Virtual Servers'. which you can find on the Library tab of the site.

• IBM VM Developer Home Pages : I accidentally stumbled across these pages from some VM Developers. Just take a look at them, some are quite interesting. I just take a couple of quick picks. Bill Bitner has some presentations but he also has a variation on the 'You must be a mainframer if ...' list, with his 'If ... you're probably not on VM'. Tung-Sing Chong has an example of 'Cloning Linux Images in z/VM' with install/setup instructions. And I also liked Steve Wilkins' 'VM-Linux on System z Storage Technologies' presentation.
  

• I also already mentioned the 'Myth vs Truth' System z page before. Well, I have the impression they added some 'myths' (or is it 'truths') about the mainframe. They also incorporated some videos that have been around on Youtube for a while like 'The IBM System z can babysit your kids'. But do take a look at the Myth vs Truth site as well. I like the ending of those clips.
  
  

As I always say, just check them out !