Last week, September 11-13, I was in Johannesburg for the IBM Technical University! The event was held at the Hyatt Regency in the Rosebank section of town. This event was focused on IBM Systems, including storage, Power systems, and IBM Z mainframe servers. Here is my recap for the third and final day:

What else can you use that data for? Adventures in Data Reuse

Slides available at [IBM Expert Network]

Did you know that IBM invented "Copy Data Management" in 1998? I do, of course, since I was one of the inventors! Originally developed for DFSMS on z/OS, there are now copy data management solutions for a multitude of operating systems, databases and applications.

This session covered IBM Spectrum Protect Snapshot, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, and IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management.

Copies of production data are not just for data protection and disaster recovery. The copies can be reused for other IT or business purposes:

• Testing and DevOps - After a copy of production is made, columns of databases containing sensitive, personally-identifiable information (PII) can be masked, scrambled or obfuscated, to keep them out of the prying eyes of testers and developers. IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management offers data masking features.
   
• Reporting and Analytics - Running reports or analytics against production data can drastically impact performance and cache hit rate on storage devices. Making copies to other systems, and running reports and analytics elsewhere makes a lot of sense.
   
• Hybrid Cloud - Why limit your copies to just your own data center? Copies of data can be sent to off-premises to perform DevOps, Reporting and Analytics in the cloud.

 

Be Persistent in your Journey to Private Cloud

IBM offers persistent storage for IBM Cloud Private deployments. This includes IBM Spectrum Virtualize family of products, Spectrum Accelerate family of products, VersaStack converged systems, and DS8000 systems.

 

IBM Spectrum Access blueprints are available to deploy persistent storage for IBM Cloud Private software on VersaStack, POWER and IBM Z servers.

IBM Spectrum Connect provides the necessary interfaces for Kubernetes to claim persistent storage for Docker containers.

 

Get ready for the NVMe revolution!

Slides available at [IBM Expert Network]

Is your data center ready for NVMe, NVMe-OF or FC-NVMe? Initiated in 2011, the NVMe standard is relatively young. I covered its short history, why zero-copy protocols like FCP and RDMA can drastically reduce latency, and all the components needed for a complete end-to-end solution.

Inside All-Flash Arrays, you can use standard 12Gbps SAS to connect to SCSI-based Solid-State Drives (SSD), or you can use the much faster PCiE bus at 32Gbps with NVMe-based drives.

NVMe provides for advanced parallelism, since flash is not mechanical, and does not rely on the position of a read/write head over a platter as spinning disks do. Traditional SSD pretend to be spinning disks, so often process one command at a time, to maintain the charade.

NVMe is designed to work only with flash devices, so it uses a streamlined 15 commands, versus the 34 commands in SCSI to handle other storage media.

But having an NVMe-inside All-Flash Array is not the end of the story. Rather than sending all of those SCSI commands across network, only for some to be disregarded when they arrive, you can send the streamlined NVMe commands instead. NVMe over the networks is available now. NVMe-OF offers support for Ethernet and InfiniBand, and FC-NVMe offers support for FCP.

The last stage is application exploitation from the host server. The industry still needs Operating System drivers, multipathing drivers, and applications that take advantage of NVMe. IBM anticipates this will occur later this year, and into 2019.

 

IBM Storage Infrastructure Optimization (SIO) assessment

Ishmail Shaik, IBM Lab Services, presented an interactive peek of what an SIO entails.

In 2005, I led a series of "Information Lifecycle Management" (ILM) studies for various clients, combining the methods from "disk studies" and "tape studies" that I had performed since the 1980s.

The ultimate win-win scenario, these ILM studies proved successful, not only saving the clients millions of dollars, but often resulting in follow-on sales of IBM storage hardware, software and services.

Over those 18 months, I trained several IBM Systems Lab Services colleagues in the process. These studies formed the basis of "Storage Infrastructure Optimization" assessments launched officially in 2011.

The SIO assessment process has evolved a lot since I was last involved with it. Here are a few of the changes I noticed from his presentation:

• Core Modules - No longer just focused on Lifecycle Management, SIO studies offer four additional modules: Modernize & Transform, Business Resiliency, Manage & Control, and New Workloads.
   
• Data Collection - The biggest challenge back then was collecting data to provide recommendations. I managed with in-person interviews and what little tools were available back then, collected into TCO spreadsheets, VISIO diagrams and PowerPoint slides. Today, we have sophisticated data collection tools, including IBM Spectrum Control, Storage Insights, Arxview, and Butterfly.
   
• Engagement Workshop - SIO now has incorporated "Design Thinking" methodology to help clients prioritize findings into a set of short-term, medium-term and long-term recommendations.

The three-day event ended with a closing session, hosted by Mario Franzone.