We've been quite busy here at the Tucson Executive Briefing Center. I am often asked to explain the relationship between IBM's various storage products. While automakers don't have to explain why they sell sports coupes, pickup trucks and minivans, this analogy does not adequately cover IT storage products. So, I have come up with a new analogy that seems to be a better fit: foundations and flavorings.

All over the world, meals are often comprised of a foundation, perhaps rice, potatoes or pasta, covered with some form of flavoring, sauces, pieces of meat or fish, grated cheese and spices. In Puerto Rico, I had dishes where the foundation was mashed bananas called [plantains]. Sandwich shops often let you pick your choice of bread, the foundation, and then your meats and cheeses, the flavorings.At our local steakhouse,[McMahon's], the menulists a set of steaks, the foundation such as Rib Eye, Filet Mignon, Prime Rib or New York Strip, andvarious flavorings, such as sauces and rubs to cover the steak. Last night, I had the Delmonico steak with the Cristiani sauce consisting of Portobello mushrooms, garlic and aged Romano cheese.

This serves as a useful analogy for IBM's storage strategy. Allowing thefoundations and flavorings to be separately orderable greatly simplifies the selection menu and providesa nearly any-to-any approach to meeting a variety of client needs.Let's take a look at both.

• Foundations

  IBM's foundation products are the DS family [DS3000, DS4000, DS5000, DS6000 and DS8000 series], [DS9900 series], and [XIV] for disk, and the TS family [TS1000, TS2000, TS3000] series for tape drives and libraries. In much thesame way you might prefer brown rice instead of white rice, or linguine instead of penne pasta, you might find the attributes of one storagefoundation more attractive based on its performance, scalability and availability features for yourparticular application workloads.
  
  

• Flavorings

  IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller [SVC]

  Fellow IBM blogger Barry Whyte discusses SVC at great length on his [Storage Virtualization] blog. Flavoring disk foundation storage with SAN Volume Controller can provide you additionalfeatures and functions, and help improve the scalability, performance or availability characteristics.For example, if you have DS4000, DS8000 and XIV, you might use SVC to provide a consistent methodologyfor asynchronous replication, a form of consistent "flavoring" if you will.
  
  

  N series Gateways

  The [N series gateways] offerflavoring to disk foundation, including unified NAS, iSCSI and FCP protocol host attachment, and application aware capabilities. (As for our IBM N series appliances or "filers", these could be foundational storage behind an SVC, but that's perhaps a topic for another post.)
  
  

  Scale-Out File Services [SoFS]

  SoFS provides a global namespace with clustered NAS access to files. This is a blended disk-and-tape solution with built-in backup and Information Lifecycle Management [ILM]. Policies can be used to place different files onto different tiers of storage, automate the movement from tier to tier, including migration to tape, and even expiration when the data is no longer needed.
  
  

  DR550

  The [IBM System Storage DR550] provides Non-erasable, Non-rewriteable (NENR) flavoring to storage. While the DR550 comes with internal disk storage, it can front end a tape library filled with WORM cartridges. The DR550 hasbeen paired up with small libraries (TS3200 or TS3310) as well as larger libraries like the TS3500.
  
  

  Grid Access

  The IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution [GMAS] provides a variety of capabilities for storing and accessing medical images, using a blended disk-and-tape approach. This allows hospital and clinicnetworks to provide access for doctors and radiologists from multiple locations.

  The underlying technologyis [IBM System Storage Multilevel Grid Access Manager] which can be used to provide grid access across multiple locations forany industry or application.
  
  

  IBM TS7650G ProtecTIER deduplication gateway

  Many of the flavorings are called "gateways". The IBM TS7650G flavors disk that provides a virtualtape library[VTL] with inline data deduplication capability. Recent performance tests pairing the TS7650G flavoring with XIV foundation storage found this combination to be an excellent match.

Let me know what you think. Does this help you understand IBM's storage strategy and acquisitions? Enteryour comments below.

technorati tags: IBM, TEBC, foundation, flavoring, plantains, McMahon, DS3000, DS4000, DS5000, DS6000, DS8000, DCS9900, XIV, TS1000, TS2000, TS3000, NAS, iSCSI, FCP, NENR, WORM, ILM, GAM, GMAS, TS7650G, ProtecTIER

Tags:  disk lifecycle tape