May 9 - DS8000 announcements

Monday, there were two announcements for the DS8000 (ZG11-0130, ZG11-0131). General availability of the announcements is June 3, 2011. DS8000 by now means DS8700 and DS8800.

Same functionality with Release 6.1
Despite the known differences (Power 6 vs Power 6+ engine, 2GB/s device adapters vs 8Gb/s and 3.5'' FC drive interface vs 2.5'' SAS-2 drive interface), they are now brought at the same functional level with one another. This means that some functionalities become available on the DS8800 as well. These include :

• Easy Tier
• Thin Provisioning
• Remote Pair FlashCopy
• z/OS Distributed Data Backup
• z/OS FICON Discovery and Auto Configuration (zDAC)
• Eight drive install groups of Solid State Disk (SSD)
• z/HPF extended distance
• . . .

On the other hand the DS8700 also gets the 8Gb/s host adapter.

Easy Tier V2
The most eye-catching change is that the Easy Tier automatic mode now supports migration between any two tiers. You no longer need SSD drives to make use of the Easy Tier automatic possibilities. Some other capabilities that come with Easy Tier V2 :

• Cold demotion - Inactive "cold" data stored on Enterprise performance Tier is demoted to a more appropriate tier.
• Warm demotion - When a specific rank in the higher tier exceeds its optimal performance level, selected extents are moved to other ranks to eliminate the growing hotspot.
• Auto-Rebalance - Easy Tier automatic mode redistributes extents within a tier whenever it shows I/O skew, when new capacity is added or when capacity is removed.

By the way : Easy Tier remains a no-charge feature.

I/O Priority Manager
I/O Priority Manager on the other hand is a priced feature and is only available for open systems.
"The system will prioritize access to system resources to achieve the volume's desired quality of service based on defined performance goals (high, medium, or low) of any volume. I/O Priority Manager will constantly monitor and balance system resources to help applications meet their performance targets automatically, without operator intervention." This only happens when there's a contention between multiple volumes. I/O Priority Manager delays the right amount of I/O from lower priority volumes, so higher priority volumes get more throughput.

Storage Manager GUI
The XIV GUI seems to be a real success as the DS8000 Storage Manager is now also aligned with the same GUI. "The enhanced design was inspired by the IBM System Storage XIV® GUI and includes more intuitive navigation panels and streamlined configuration processes, as well as embedded links to relevant videos for quick access to useful DS8000 information".
For more information about this GUI, take a look at the 'Simplify the Flightdeck' post at the Aussie Storage Blog.

In addition to that, there is also some enhancements for security, copy services an large LUNs for open systems.