This month, IBM Tucson Development Lab is celebrating 40 year anniversary! IBM has been operating in Arizona for the past 70 years, and of course IBM has been in the storage business for the past 90 years if you consider "punched cards" as storage on paper.

This year also marks the 40 year anniversary of DFHSM, the first product I worked on when I started here back in 1986. DFHSM stands for the Data Facility Hierarchical Storage Manager, which effectively moves data between disk and tape storage.

IBM put up two banners to celebrate! The first was for IBM Enterprise Tape storage. My first question was "What are punched cards doing on a banner for magnetic tape?"

A bit of history will explain that the first tape storage was non-magnetic. Back in 1725, Basile Bouchon developed the control of a loom by punched holes in paper tape. These were used to create intricate patterns in woven cloth.

In the late 1880s, Herman Hollerith, a young technical whiz at the US Census Bureau, had an idea for a machine that could count and sort census results far faster than human clerks. The bureau funded Hollerith’s work, and the [first tabulating machines] helped count the 1890 census, saving the bureau several years’ work and more than US$5 million.

Hollerith left the bureau to form the Tabulating Machine Company, selling his system to other countries’ census offices and then to businesses such as railroads and retailers. Hollerith had little competition, and his machines and punched cards became the standard for the industry.

In 1911, financier Charles Flint bought the Tabulating Machine Company and merged it with the International Time Recording Company and the Computing Scale Company of America to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or C-T-R, later renamed IBM in 1924.

In 1928, IBM introduced a new version of the punched card with rectangular holes and 80 columns. The 80-character standard was used from everything from the first computer screens, to the first file layouts

It wasn't until 1952 that the first magnetic tape system hit the scene: the IBM model 726. Tape reels were the size of pizzas, and were prominently shown spinning around in various Hollywood movies to represent computers "working" on a problem.

In my now infamous 2007 post [Hu Yoshida should know better], I explain the 3850 Mass Storage System (MSS). In 1974, The IBM 3850 MSS was one of the first hybrid disk-and-tape storage systems. It was an automated tape library pretending to be disk, with tape cartridges stored in hexagonal honeycomb shelves. The tape cartridges were cylindrical, about the size of a can of soda. The spool of 770 feet of tape media held just 5MB of data.

A full IBM 3850 MSS configuration with thousands of tape cartridges was used for the 1980 US Census, holding 102 GB database, representing the data collected about 226.5 million U.S. residents. That's about 450 bytes per resident, enough to fill six punched cards.

In 1984, [IBM re-imagined tape media] again, to square cartridges: the IBM 3480.

Two years later, I joined IBM in 1986, the year IBM introduced "improved data recording capability" capability for the IBM 3480, the first industry use of compression for tape magnetic media.

In 2012, IBM celebrated the [60 year anniversary of Tape Systems].

The second banner was for IBM Enterprise Disk storage.

IBM introduced the IT industry's first commercial disk system in 1956. While the banner says "RAMAC 305", that is the name of the server. The storage system was called the [350 Disk Storage Unit]. It was the size of two refrigerators and held 5 MB of data.

In the early 1990s, I visited a client in Germany that had a 3990 controller with two 3390 disk systems attached, holding 90 GB of data in the size of three refrigerators. They had five storage administrators to manage this configuration.

A few years later at another client, they had roughly 7000 GB (7 TB) of data on their mainframe, and an equal amount across all of their Windows and UNIX servers. I met with their storage administrators, there were two for the mainframe, and about three dozen for the distributed servers.

I had two questions for them. First, why were there two storage admins for the mainframe? The mature policy-based automation on the platform would mean only one person required. Their response: when one of us is on a two-week vacation, the other can handle the workload.

My second question was for the remaining storage admins: When was the last time any of you took a two-week vacation? None had, of course, since the storage administration tools back then meant they were all working overtime on various tedious and manual tasks!

In February 2006, the folks in IBM Germany asked the IBM Storage Marketing team what events or celebration were planned for September 13, 2016, the 50 year anniversary of disk. My marketing colleagues responded, "that is only seven months away, you didn't give us enough lead time notice to plan!"

To help with celebration, I launched this blog in September 2006, and mentioned the [50 year anniversary of Disk Systems] in one of my first posts.

Next month, June 16, to be precise, marks my own 32 year anniversary working on IBM Storage. It is fun to look back at all we have accomplished!

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

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM, and have either written code and/or presented the DS8000 storage system and Spectrum Storage products in my professional capacity. This blog post can be considered a "paid celebrity endorsement" for the IBM DS8000 Storage System and Spectrum Storage software.)

IBM DS8880 and DS8880F Storage Systems

For those not up on the DS8000 nomenclature, here's a quick recap:

• DS8880 supports a hybrid mix of Flash cards, SSD, 15K, 10K and 7200 rpm drives.

  This includes the DS8884 and DS8886. The Flash cards are held in High Performance Flash Enclosures (HPFE) directly attached to the controllers, whereas the SSD and spinning disk are in shelves connected via the Device Adapters.

• DS8880F is an all-flash array, with Flash cards only in HPFE. This includes the DS8884F, DS8886F and DS8888F models.
  
  
• DS8880/F is convenient shorthand to refer to both the hybrid and all-flash models collectively.

Today, IBM announces new 7.68TB flash cards for the High Performance Flash Enclosures of the IBM DS8880/F. These are double the capacity of the 3.84TB cards currently available, doubling the total capacity to 368.6TB per HPFE.

Different DS8880 models support a different number of HPFE. An HPFE is a pair of 2U drawers, holding a total of 48 flash cards. You can purchase flash in groups of 16 cards, with the option to mix and match within the HPFE. For example, you can have 16 cards at the 1.6TB capacity, 16 cards with 3.68TB and 16 cards of the new 7.68TB capacity, all in a single HPFE.

The new 7.68TB support 1 Drive Write Per Day (DWPD). Some people call these "Read-Intensive" drives, but IBM refers to them as "High-Capacity Drives", to differentiate them from the "High Performance Drives" that support 10 DWPD.

In reality, the read performance is similar in both types of Flash cards offered, but the write performance is slightly slower for the High-Capacity drives due in part to additional garbage collection performed in the background. Our studies found that over 90 percent of workloads might find the High-Capacity drives good enough to handle I/O requirements.

IBM Easy Tier was updated to distinguish between High-Performance and High-Capacity flash cards, so that blocks of data that have higher or lower I/O characteristics will be relocated to the appropriate level of storage.

To learn more, see [DS8880 Gen1], [DS8880 Gen2], and [DS8880F] press releases.

IBM Spectrum Storage Suite v1.1

The newest level of IBM Spectrum Storage Suite simplifies procurement by bringing together the latest releases of the following software:

• IBM Spectrum Accelerate V11
• IBM Spectrum Archive Enterprise Edition V1 (Linux edition)
• IBM Spectrum Control Advanced Edition V5
• IBM Spectrum Protect Suite V8 (including Spectrum Protect Plus!)
• IBM Spectrum Scale Data Management Edition V5
• IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software for SAN Volume Controller V8 (including FlashCopy and Remote Mirror, Real-time Compression and Encryption Software)
• IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software-only V8
• IBM Cloud Object Storage System V3

Instead of buying software products separately, a single license enables administrators to deploy IBM Spectrum Storage Suite software when and where they need it, without having to wait. Simplified capacity pricing can significantly reduce software costs and time spent on license management.

The Spectrum Storage suite also offers a "sandbox" approach for try-and-buy. Since you have access to all the software listed, you can set up a sandbox to experiment with the functionality, without having to pay for the added capacity, until you deploy it to dev/test, quality assurance, or production.

The suite is licensed per Tebibyte [TiB]. For those not familiar with international standards, here is a comparison table:

Terminology	Abbreviation	Notation	Quantity
Terabyte	TB	Always decimal, 10 to the 12th power	1,000,000,000,000 bytes
Tebibyte	TiB	Always binary, 2 to the 40th power	1,099,511,627,776 bytes

The two terms sound similar and represent nearly the same quantity within 10 percent of each other, so it is understandable when people mistakenly use the terms interchangeably.

To learn more, see the [IBM Spectrum Storage Suite V1.1] press release.

IBM Food Trust™ platform

From farm to fork, IBM Food Trust platform is a collaborative network of growers, processors, wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers, retailers and others enhancing visibility and accountability in each step of the food supply.

Powered by the IBM Blockchain Platform on IBM servers and storage systems, IBM Food Trust directly connects participants through a permissioned, permanent and shared record of food origin details, processing data, shipping details and more.

(This reminds me of a funny story: the man sitting next to me on my flight back from an IBM Systems conference in New Orleans asked me, "You look familiar. Didn't I see you at the conference this week?" I responded "Yes, were you there for the "server" or "storage" side?" He thought about it for a while, and said "I guess the server side". "Too bad", I replied, "I am on the storage side."

It took us a while, but I realized he worked in the food and restaurant industry, and that he was at a completely different conference. It happened to also have both a "server" and "storage" side!)

The IBM Food Trust platform provides new levels of transparency, quicker recalls, better standardized communication and protection of brand value. As an authorized user, you have immediate access to shared, actionable food supply data through integrated IBM Blockchain-powered modules for faster traceability and more confidence in provenance.

Today, IBM announces new services to enable clients to successfully connect to and make use of the IBM Food Trust Platform.

To learn more, see the [IBM Food Trust virtually-guided onboarding services] press release, and the [Welcome to IBM Food Trust] and [Enhance traceability and safety of food] landing pages.

All this talk about food is making me hungry!

This week, May 14-18, is Business Continuity Awareness Week!

This worldwide event, sponsored by the [Business Continuity Institute], promotes education and awareness designed to increase our understanding of business continuity, teach clients on ways to understand and manage IT and business risks, and introduce new techniques and technologies designed to minimize and even to eliminate business and personal disruption.

IBM is actively involved. Monday starts off with opening statements by Andrea Sayles, IBM General Manager of Resiliency Services, and Michael Puldy, IBM Director of Global Business Continuity Management.

The event offers a variety of online webinars, as well as a wealth of educational resources.

For example, on Wednesday May 16, at 6:00am EDT, my coworker Karpagam Venkataraman (KV), IBM Distinguished Engineer, Resiliency Orchestration Product Management, will present [Automating Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity in the Hybrid Cloud Environment]. You can [Register here] to participate.

It is an honor that IBM submitted my presentation [The Seven Tiers of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery] as a technical resource for this event. It was one of the sessions I held last week at the [IBM Systems Technical University in Orlando].

Business Continuity is not just for mainframes, it can apply also to data centers using VMware and Hyper-V virtualization. Eric Herzog, IBM Vice President of Product Marketing and Management for IBM Storage Systems, has a blog post titled [Easier availability, easier on your wallet with the IBM Spectrum Protect suite].

You can follow the event on social media:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBCEye/
• Twitter (#BCAW2018): https://twitter.com/TheBCEye @TheBCEye
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/1022236/

technorati tags: IBM, BCAW, #BCAW2018, Business Continuity, Business Continuity Awareness Week, Business Continuity Institute, Andrea Sayles, Michael Puldy, Karpagam Venkataraman, Eric Herzog, TheBCEye

Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements! There were a lot of IBM Power System announcements on Tuesday, so the IBM Power team asked us to wait until Thursday to post about all of the IBM storage announcements, to avoid overwhelming excitement levels with the press and analysts.

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM. I have either worked on the code, developed marketing materials, and/or represented each of the products below in my professional capacity. This blog post can be considered a "paid celebrity endorsement")

Spectrum Virtualize

A few months ago, IBM re-factored its internals. Spectrum Virtualize will continue to support its legacy storage pools, but also offered "Data Reduction Pools", or "DR pools" for short. At the time, this supported only Thin Provisioning and Compression. See fellow blogger Barry Whyte's post on [Data Reduction Pools] for more details.

Spectrum Virtualize 8.1.3 release now adds Data Duplication and RESTful API support for the Spectrum Virtualize family, including SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystem V9000 and Storwize products. These features also apply to Spectrum Virtualize as software only, and to Spectrum Virtualize for the Public Cloud.

Data Deduplication is a form of data footprint reduction. Like the deduplication in Spectrum Protect and FlashSystem A9000/R products, Spectrum Virtualize will use SHA1 hash codes to identify duplicate 8K blocks. If the hash code of the block about to be written does not match any existing hash code previously written to the cluster, it is considered unique data.

Legacy storage pools supported three kinds of volumes: fully-allocated, thin-provisioned, and compressed-thin volumes. The new DR pools support five kinds: fully-allocated, thin-provisioned, deduped-thin, compressed-thin, and deduped-compressed-thin volumes.

The new deduplication feature is included at no additional charge with the base Spectrum Virtualize license.

The RESTful API enables storage admins to easily automate common tasks with industry-standard tools. RestAPI support is available to interface with the command-line interface (CLI), create vDisk volumes and generate views normally available through the CLI, and secure authentication to the IBM Spectrum Virtualize family.

The SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystem V9000 and Storwize family now also support 12TB drives for internal storage. These are 7200 rpm 3.5 inch drives that can be in the 2U 12-bay or 5U 92-bay expansion drawers, or directly in the 12-bay Storwize controllers. Spectrum Virtualize 7.8.1 is the minimum level to support these high-capacity disks.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, available on IBM Cloud, has been enhanced to support a full eight node cluster (four node-pairs, or "I/O Groups" as they are called). This can be used as a target for remote mirror from your Spectrum Virtualize cluster on premises.

IBM offers data footprint reduction, high availability, and technical refresh guarantee programs for these products. See Ernie Pitt's blog post on [Peace of Mind with IBM Storage].

To learn more, see [Spectrum Virtualize 8.1.3] and [Spectrum Virtualize 12 TB Drives] press releases, and the [IBM Peace of Mind initiative] technical whitepaper.

 

Spectrum Scale and Elastic Storage Server (ESS)

IBM Spectrum Scale 5.0 is highly scalable file and object storage system. It is available as software, pre-built appliances, and in the Cloud.

The pre-built appliances are called "Elastic Storage Server", combining Spectrum Scale software on two IBM Power servers with drawers of flash or disk drives.

IBM introduces two new "Hybrid" models to the ESS family. GH14 has one 2U drawer with 24 Solid State Drives (SSD) combined with four 5U drawers with 7200rpm spinning disk. The GH2R has two 2U drawers with four 5U drawers.

Like the GS models, the SSD are either 3.84TB or 15.3TB capacities. The 5U drawers are similar to those in the GL models, either 4TB, 8TB or 10TB capacities.

A new Enterprise Slim Rack (S42) is now available to hold these. The S42 is available for all ESS orders, including the GS, GL and new GH models.

To learn more, see [ESS Hybrid Models] press release.

 

Storage Insights

IBM has shortened the name of "Spectrum Control Storage Insights" to just "Storage Insights" and made it available in two flavors: Storage Insights, and Storage Insights Pro.

Storage Insights is a no-cost cloud Artificial Intelligence (AI) service that provides common monitoring capabilities to all of your IBM block-level storage, including IBM FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Storwize, DS8000 models and IBM XIV Storage Systems. Here are some of the capabilities offered:

• View the health, performance, and capacity of all your IBM-supported devices from a single place
• Filter storage device events to help you focus on the things that require your immediate attention
• Act on predictive insights provided by device intelligence before anomalies have an impact on service levels
• Use actionable data you get to resolve more issues on your own
• Open and view IBM support tickets
• Enable IBM Support to automatically collect log packages with no interaction with the client

IBM Storage Insights Pro includes everything in Storage Insights as well as these additional capabilities. This is a fee-based cloud service, licensed per TiB per month, for the added functionality:

• Customizable alerting
• Business impact analysis
• Data placement optimization with tier planning
• Capacity optimization with reclamation planning
• Supports file and object storage, including IBM Spectrum Scale, Elastic Storage Server (ESS), and IBM Cloud Object Storage (IBM COS)

Both Storage Insights and Storage Insights Pro use a "data collector" that runs on premises. This can be any bare metal server or Virtual Machine running Windows, Linux or AIX operating system connected to the SAN, with access to the Internet to upload the data to the IBM Cloud.

If you have IBM block storage today, there is no reason not to try this out. You can download the "data collector" and start using Storage Insights right away. If you like it, consider upgrading to Storage Insights Pro, or the full on-premise Spectrum Control product.

To learn more, see [Storage Insights] press release.

IBM's Spectrum Storage family is recognized as #1 in Software Defined Storage by industry analysts. These announcements help strengthen that leadership.

technorati tags: IBM, Spectrum Virtualize, Data Reduction Pool, Data Deduplication, RESTful API, RestAPI, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, Storwize, FlashSystem V9000, Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, SHA1, FlashSystem A9000, FlashSystem A9000R, Spectrum Protect, Ernie Pitt, Peace of Mind, IBM Guarantee, Spectrum Scale, Elastic Storage Server, ESS, SSD, ESS GH14, ESS GH24, ESS Hybrid, Enterprise Slim Rack, S42 Rack, Spectrum Control, Storage Insights, Storage Insights Pro, data collector, Artificial Intelligence, AI, DS8000, IBM Cloud Object Storage, IBM COS