Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements!

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM. This blog post can be considered a "paid celebrity endorsement" of the IBM Z and IBM storage products mentioned below.)

DS8880 R8.3.3 Enhancements

Back in 2015, IBM [DS8880 models] of the DS8000 family. Sales drastically increased, in part because IBM re-designed the systems to be a standard 19-inch wide rack, rather than the 33-inch wide custom sizes used before. Many cloud service providers (CSP) and managed service providers (MSP) require 19-inch standard rack configurations.

To meet client requirements, the newest IBM mainframes, including Z14 model ZR1 and LinuxONE Rockhopper II, are now following the same 19-inch rack size!

IBM DS8880 models now have enhanced support for zHyperlink connections. Clients with existing 6-core DS8884/F or 8-core DS8886/F models can upgrade to add more cores for zHyperlink connectivity.

System	Cores per CEC	Maximum zHyperlink connections
DS8884 DS8884F	6 cores	None
	12 cores	4
DS8886 DS8886F	8 cores	None
	16 cores	8
	24 cores	12
DS8888 DS8888F	24 cores	12
	48 cores	16

The zHyperlink supports both 40-meter and 150-meter cables. This allows applications like DB2 to read data with substantially lower latency than traditional FICON attachment.

For IBM z/OS clients, the Transparent Cloud Tiering feature allows migration of data directly from DS8000 storage systems to the cloud. This eliminates migrating data through the IBM Z, consuming MIPS and FICON traffic, back out to a tape or virtual tape system. IBM now offers 10GbE cards for the DS8880, providing faster throughput than the existing 1GbE cards previously available.

To learn more, see [DS8880 Gen 1], [DS8880 Gen 2], [DS8880F All-Flash Arrays], [z14 model ZR1], [LinuxONE Rockhopper II] press releases.

IBM Spectrum Scale v5.0 for IBM Elastic Storage Server

IBM Spectrum Scale v5.0 was available as software last year, and now is available as a Software PID for Elastic Storage Server hardware.

The new version introduces per-drive editions for licensing: Data Access edition, and Data Management edition. Here are highlights of some of the features:

• Enhancements to GUI usability, including managing file systems between ESS and non-ESS storage
• Audit File Logging (Data Management Edition only) for Open, Close, Destroy (Delete), Rename, Unlink, Remove Directory, Extended Attributed change, Access Control List (ACL) change
• Enhancements to Active File Management, providing WAN-caching for multi-site deployments
• Independent KPMG certification will be done for Spectrum Scale v5.0 on ESS for the "Immutability" feature. Some people refer to this as WORM, Government Compliance, Tamperproof, or Non-Erasable, Non-Rewriteable (NENR) enforcement protection
• Enhancements to Transparent Cloud Tiering, providing archive of less-active data to IBM Cloud Object Storage, IBM Cloud, or Amazon S3.
• Certification for analytics on both x86 and POWER platforms: Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) v2.6, and Ambari v2.5
• Improved I/O performance for many small and large block size workloads simultaneously, including a 4 MB default block size with variable sub-block size based on block size choice

Spectrum Scale 5.0 is incorporated into "Elastic Storage Server Solution Release 5.3". It is unfortunate the numbering is different. Existing ESS clients can download this new ESS 5.3 code from IBM FixCentral today. Going forward, starting next week or so, new Elastic Storage Servers will ship with ESS solution release 5.3 pre-installed.

To learn more, see [IBM Spectrum Scale for IBM Elastic Storage Server V5.0] press release.

TS4500 support for mixed media configurations

The TS4500 tape library supports both TS1100 and LTO tape drives.

This feature supports mixed media in a TS4500 tape library. If you are using Library-Managed Encryption (LME), then IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager is required as the key manager with LTO drives and cartridges.

To learn more, see [TS4500 Library] press release.

IBM Aspera on Cloud

IBM Aspera is often referred to as "File Transfer on Steroids". It provides a high-speed file transfer service between servers.

IBM Aspera on Cloud now offers some cloud storage (1TB to 25TB) to enable Cloud-based file transfers. This comes in three editions: Standard edition, Advanced edition, and Enterprise edition.

To learn more, see [IBM Aspera on Cloud] press release.

In a few weeks, I will be presenting at the [IBM Systems Technical University], April 30-May 4, in Orlando Florida. If you plan to attend, come look for me. I will be there all week!

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