Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Ethernet switches and routers

In support of Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage, IBM is now back in theEthernet networking business. This is part of storage as protocols likeiSCSI, CIFS and NFS are gaining prominence. Extending IBM's existing OEMrelationship with Brocade, there are four series:

• [c-series] - "c" for Compact, these are 1U high fixed port switches
• [g-series] - "g" for Pay-as-you-Grow using IronStack stacking technology to allow up to 8 switches to be glommed, glued, er.. "gathered" together as a single virtual chassis.
• [m-series] - "m" for Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS] which supports routing between LAN and WAN networks over OC12 and OC48 lines.
• [s-series] - "s" for slots, the B08S has eight slots, and the B16S has sixteen slots, supporting up to 384 ports. These models support Power-over-Ethernet [PoE] that simplifies attaching Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephones and IP-based surveillance cameras.

IBM announced it will strengthen its partnership with Juniper Networks, and continues to consider Cisco a strategic partner as well. To help customer position themselves for Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage,IBM also launches some new services:

• [Network Strategy and Optimization]
• [Network Consolidation and Virtualization]
• [Network Integration Services for Data Center Networks]

IBM System Storage DS5000 disk system

The IBM [DS5000] now supports self-encrypting disk drives, known also as "full-disk encryption" or FDE, for added security, and 8Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) ports for added performance. The DS5300 model in particular now supports up to 448 disk drives for added scalability.

Comprehensive Data Protection Solution

IBM's [Data Protection Solution] shows off IBM's awesome synergy between servers, storage and software. Combining System x servers, Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack software, and DS5000, DS4000 or DS3000 series disk systems. The solution is designed to both Windows-based servers and their applications, offering bare metal restores, and application–level protection for Oracle, SQL, Exchange and SAP.

Tivoli Storage Productivity Center

Last February, IBM previewed the renaming of TotalStorage Productivity Center to its new name,Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. Today, IBM announces [Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v4.1]. Some key changes include:

• Productivity Center for Fabric has been merged into Productivity Center for Disk
• Productivity Center for Replication is now integrated, but remains separately licensed
• Productivity Center can now feed input to IBM's Novus Storage Enterprise Resource Planner [SERP]

TS7650 ProtecTIER Data Deduplication IP-based replication

IBM previews IP-based replication which allows the TS7650 appliance or TS7650G gateway to sendvirtual tape data over to a remote location. This is instead of having the underlying disk systemsperform the replication on its behalf. Having the TS7650 do the replication is preferred, as itcan maintain virtual cartridge integrity, when a virtual tape is unmounted the replication can beginat that point.

This is just a small subset of all the announcements. For more information, see this 28-pagepresentation [Manage the Explosion of Information with IBM Information Infrastructure].

technorati tags: IBM, Dynamic Infrastructure, Ethernet, switches, routers, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage, Brocade, Juniper Networks, Cisco, IronStack, FCoE, FCoCEE, PoE, DS5000, FC, FDE, TSM, FastBack, TotalStorage, Tivoli, Storage, Productivity Center, Novus, SERP, TS7650, TS77650G, ProtecTIER, Information Infrastructure

New Factory configurations for XIV

The first announcement is for new [factory configurations] for the IBM XIV disk system. In the past, you could only order a partial 6-module or a full 15-module rack. Today, IBM announced that there will also be 9-, 10-, 11-, 12-, 13- and 14-module configurations orderable as well.

Some FUD out in the blogosphere led some to believe that these partial configurations had to be made full 15 modules within 12 months. That is false. You can order any of these partial rack configurations and leave them as is until you need more capacity. There is no obligation to buy more capacity with these partial rack configurations.

IBM N series N6060 configurations

This second announcement indicates that the N6060 supports[672 drives]. The N6060 is the latest midrange model of IBM N series unified storage.

If you are asking "What is a 672 drive?" don't feel stupid. It actuallyrefers to the number of external drives that can be attached to the N6060. Previously, it was mis-reported that the N6060 could support as many as 840 drives, but this was not correct, and this announcement is to fixthat typo.

IBM Passport Advantage Sub-Capacity Licensing

This last announcement today relates to IBM Passport Advantage[sub-capacity licensing].Pricing products is always a challenge. You want to come up with a pricing methodology such that people who get the most use pay the most, and those who get less pay less, in a manner that everyone thinks is fair. With commodities, it is simple to price rice by the pound, or fabric by the yard, but what about IT solutions?

Some of the IBM software is based on number of processors used, so that people who have the software running on multiple machines, or machines with multiple cores, should pay more because they are getting more value. This makes sense if this software is the only thing running on that server, but today you can also have server virtualization and are running many guest operating systems, each with different applications. The solution is to use "sub-capacity" licensing. If you have a quad-core processor server, but have four guest operating systems using 25 percent of this, then each OS should only pay for one processor's worth of licensing. Since different processors have different clock speeds, IBM has standardized the calculations to a mythical "Processor Value Unit" or PVU, with a corresponding IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT).

Initially, this will cover specific versions of Citrix Xen Server, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware, but IBM has made as a "statement of direction" that it will extend this sub-capacity licensing and ILMT support to IBM PowerVM capability for its POWER systems.

I have often heard clients complain that their third party software vendor does not support these hypervisors. Sometimes, this means the third party vendor will not fix or provide assistance if the problem occurs in this environment, and other times, it is that the pricing does not favor this environment, you get charged for all the processors, even if your slice of the processor is much smaller.

If you are at SNW this week, stop by and say "Hi" to my fellow IBM collegues for me.

technorati tags: IBM, SNW09, XIV, N6060, PVU, ILMT, Citrix, Xen, Hyper-V, VMware, ILMT

Today, IBM announced the enhanced IBM System Storage DS3200 disk system.It is in our DS3000 series, the DS3200 is SAS-attach, DS3300 is iSCSI-attach, and DS3400 is FC-attach. All of them support up to 48 drives, which can be a mix of SAS and SATA drives.

The DS3200 supports the following operating environments (see IBM's [Interop Matrix] for details):

• Microsoft Windows
• Linux (both Linux-x86 and Linux on POWER)
• AIX
• Sun Solaris
• VMware
• Novell NetWare

With today's announcements, the DS3200 can be used to boot from, as well as contain data. This is ideal to combine with IBM BladeCenter. With the IBM BladeCenter you can have 14 blades, either x86 or POWER based processors, attached to a DS3200 via SAS switch modules in the back of the chassis.

Let's take an example of how this can be used for a Scale-Out File Services[SoFS] deployment.

Servers

First, we start with servers. We can have either three [IBM System x3650] servers, but this would use up all six of the direct-attach ports. Instead, we'll choose the [BladeCenter H chassis], with three HS21 blades for SoFS, and that leaves us with eleven empty blade slots we could put in a management node, or other blades to run applications.

SAS connectivity modules

The IBM BladeCenter [SAS Connectivity Module] allows the blade servers to connect to a DS3200. Two of them fit right in the back of the BladeCenter chassis, providing full redundancy without consuming additional rack space.

DS3200 and EXP3000 expansion drawers

We'll have one DS3200 controller with twelve internal drives, and three expansion EXP3000 drawers with twelve drives each, for a total of 48 drives. Using 1TB SATA, this would be 48 TB raw capacity.

The end result? You get a 48TB NAS scalable storage solution, supporting up to 7500 concurrent CIFS and NFS users, with up to 700 MB/sec with large block transfers. By using BladeCenter, you can expand performance by adding more blades to the Chassis, or have some blades running SAP or Oracle RAC have direct read/write access to the SoFS data.

Just another example on how IBM can bring together all the components of a solution to provide customer value!

technorati tags: IBM, DS3200, BladeCenter, Linux, AIX, Windows, Solaris, VMware, NetWare, POWER, SAS, EXP3000, SATA, CIFS, NFS, SoFS

IBM TS7650 and TS7650G ProtecTIER deduplication

In addition to the [TS7650G gateway model] new [Enterprise Edition V2 software], IBM announced four new [TS7650 appliance models] for a complete, integrated solution. The fourconfigurations include the controller and disk:

• 7TB, single controller
• 18TB, single controller
• 36TB, single controller
• 36TB, dual controller in clustered configuration

These disk capacities can have up to 25x times their effective capacity with IBM's HyperFactorin-line deduplication capability. So the smallest 7TB model could be as effective as 175TB of traditionaldisk storage.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) v6

After years and years in development, IBM announces[TSM v6]. Here's a quick summary of the key features:

• DB2 instead of an internal database

  For years, people have complained that IBM used its own internal relational database. This was becausewhen TSM was first launched back in 1993, the DB2 did not have all the features on all of the various server platforms that TSM needed. Today, DB2is the leading relational database on all the key platforms that TSM server runs on, and therefore good enough for use within Tivoli Storage Manager. If you don't already have DB2, it is included for use with TSM v6.1 at no additional charge. Do you have to become a DB2 expert to use TSM? No! The TSM administration commands have been updated to hide all the complexity of DB2 away, behind the scenes. You now just use TSM commands to administer the database,as you did before. IBM will provide conversion utilities to help existing TSM customers migrate to thisnew database environment.

• Better Operational Reporting

  Another big complaint was that TSM had fixed reporting, and administrators that wanted customized reportsoften had to resort to purchasing third party products. With the change over to DB2, TSM now enables youto create your own reports using Eclipse's Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools[BIRT]! If you haven't used BIRT, you can downloada free open source copy and start playing around with its capabilities. This is combined with a revamped GUI that provides a customizable dashboard using IBM's Integrated Solutions Console (ISC)infrastructure.

• Software-based Deduplication

  Lastly, IBM has incorporated deduplication capability within the TSM v6.1 software for its own diskstorage pools. This is done in a post-process manner so as to dedupe all of your legacy backup dataas well, not just the new stuff, without impacting the current TSM server performance.

  At this point, you might be thinking "Wait, what about IBM TS7650 ProtecTIER deduplication?" which is really two questions.

  1. Can I use TSM v6.1 with IBM TS7650 ProtecTIER?

     Yes, however since TSM progressive incremental method is vastly more efficientthan other backup products like Veritas NetBackup or EMC Legato NetWorker, the TS7650 may only get 10x reductionof TSM backups, versus up to 25x with full-backups-every-night backup schemes. TSM only dedupes itsdisk storage pools, so it won't dedupe data directed at tape systems like the TS7650 or othertape libraries. This avoids the "double dedupe" concern.

  2. When should I use TSM's software version versus TS7650's hardware deduplication?

     This is a positioning question. For now, the cut-over point is about 10TB per night backup processing. If youbackup more than 10TB per night, TS7650 hardware may be the better approach. If you are a smaller customer nowhere near that volume of data, then using TSM v6.1 software deduplication may be a morecost-effective solution. If you start small, and grow beyond 10TB per night, it is easy to bring ina TS7650 into an existing TSM environment and migrate the data over.

• Sub-capacity Licensing

  If you run TSM server on a logical partition (LPAR) or virtual guest OS under VMware ESX, Xen or Microsoft'sHyper-V environment, why should you have to license it for the whole box? With TSM v6.1, you nowcan pay for only the amount of processors you use, down to a single core even.If you currently run TSM v5 on z/OS, you can migrate over to TSM v6.1 server for Linux on System z totake advantage of cost savings using IFL engines.

IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM) v1.0

Don't let the "v1.0" scare you, this is the successor to IBM's Encryption Key Manager (EKM) that hasthousands of clients using today with IBM encrypting tape drives. The new TKLM adds support for full disk encryption (FDE) drives--like those for the DS8000 I mentioned in [yesterday's post]--as well as new features to support key rotation for compliance and business controls.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center

Last, but not least, we have IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center [TSPC]. No, that is not a typo. IBM is renaming IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center to Tivoli Storage Productivity Center toavoid trademark conflicts with the [Professional Golfer's Association].

This is not just renaming existing product. Here some key improvements:

• TSPC brings back together Productivity Center Standard Edition (Disk, Tape, SAN and Data) with Productivity Center for Replication, which were separate at birth a few years ago.
• TSPC adds support for IBM's Storage Enterprise Resource Planner[SERP] from theNovusCG acquisition.
• End-to-end view for EMC storage devices connected to supported servers via EMC Powerpath multipathing driver. As customers switch away from EMC Control Center over to IBM's Productivity Center, IBM can continue to provide support for existing EMC gear.

Of course, IBM will still offer IBM System Storage Productivity Center[SSPC] which is a piece of hardware pre-installed with Productivity Center software.

Hopefully, you can now see why I had to split up all these announcements into separate posts acrossmultiple days!

technorati tags: IBM, TS7650, TS7650G, gateway, appliance, ProtecTIER, HyperFactor, TSM, DB2, BIRT, deduplication, Veritas, NetBackup, EMC, Legato Networker, LPAR, VMware, Xen, Hyper-V, z/OS, Linux, TKLM, TSPC, SSPC, Productivity Center