Spring has finally sprung in this part of the Northern Hemisphere and the plants are blooming right and left. In the past few days I've seen daffodils, crocus (croci?), and snow drops. The birds are out and singing - I've seen a very pretty cardinal flying around our house. And let me put in a quick plug for the Early Bird discount at Edge 2014. The event itself is from 19-23 May 2014, but the Early Bird discount ends on 20 April 2014, so don't delay.
Even so, we're having a bit of a tussle between the climate and the weather. The climate is the long term trend - normally it will be around 70F (21C) this time of year. However, it was much warmer over the weekend and today it is much colder. Climate is a gradual process, while weather is what is happening outside NOW.
Turning to technical matters for a moment, I want to explain the difference betweek Easy Tier and I/O Priority Manager (IOPM), both of which are available on our flagship DS8870. Both of them modify the performance of applications. Easy Tier aims to migrate data to the appropriate tier of storage. IOPM is designed to give maintain the best possible response for key applications. They sound similar, but here's the difference. Easy Tier is, by design, a gradual process. We move up to 8GB every five minutes, so as not to impact the customer applications. It's meant to be a background process, invisible to the customer right away, but gradually making the response time better and better. IOPM is designed to work right NOW, nearly instantaneously giving a boost to the most important applications. The customer defines which LUNs or volumes should have the best response times. IOPM constantly monitors I/Os to those LUNs and volumes, and should they be falling short of where they should be, then IOPM will delay lower priority I/Os to give more system resources to the key applications.
For more on IOPM, read this redbook. For more on Easy Tier, see this redbook (and note that a draft version was available as of this posting).
Happy spring to all! (or fall depending on which half of the world you live in).
