Announcement : DS8870 Release 7.1

Today there were two announcements for the DS8870. One on hardware : 'IBM System Storage DS8870 (machine type 2421, 2422, 2423, and 2424) delivers advanced Easy Tier capabilities, enhanced resiliency, and business continuity functions (ZP13-0060)' and one on related software functionalities : 'IBM System Storage DS8870 (Machine type 2396, 2397, 2398, and 2399) Function Authorizations for advanced Easy Tier Server capabilities (ZG13-0055)'.

Apart from every one putting more and more focus on Flash, I think a large part of this announcement is about Easy Tier V5. But not everything applies to System z. The first feature is only applicable to Power systems : Easy Tier Server, which allows to copy some of the hottest data to SSD disks on the Power server. These SSD disks serve as a cache and should give you much faster response times by overcoming latency of the SAN. This remains of course managed by Easy Tier itself.

Easy Tier Application gives the administrator some influence over the Easy Tier automatic processes as he can sort of overrule them for specific cases. It "is an application-aware storage application programming interface (API) to help deploy storage more efficiently through enabling applications and middleware to direct more optimal placement of data by communicating important information about current workload activity and application performance requirements. In this release, the new Easy Tier Application feature also enables clients to assign distinct application volumes to a particular tier in the Easy Tier pool, disregarding Easy Tier's advanced data migration function". It also gives better insight in the working of Easy Tier.

The Easy Tier Heat Map Transfer utility "is able to provide whatever the data placement algorithm is on the Metro Mirror/Global Copy/Global Mirror (MM/GC/GM) primary site and reapply it on the MM/GC/GM secondary site(...). With this capability, DS8000 systems can maintain application-level performance at an application secondary site when it takes over in supporting a workload after a failover from the primary to secondary site". The last two features are of course platform independent.

What else ? I won't sum up everything but I just want to mention two other things

• Prevention of accidental loss of data when initializing a z/OS volume with ICKDSF INIT or REFORMAT. Ability to determine what z/OS Systems a volume is online to.
• There's a low cost entry class configuration option which comes down to more drives per device adapter

The software announcement is about the Function Authorizations which "are for billing purposes only". The new function which is introduced is for the Easy Tier Server function : IBM System Storage Easy Tier Server indicator (feature number 7084).

And for all the rest of the goodies ? Well, just check out the announcements ?