Vdisks, Mdisks, Extents and Grains - Scale Out for SureI think I missed January, it certainly seems like February has snuck up on us - maybe its because every day here in the UK is merging into one... since us Brits love to talk about the weather... its been kinda boring, rain rain, oh look its raining. It feels more like being back in Scotland where we have many words to describe rain, my favourite being smirr or smirring. Meanwhile back in the land of storage, I've been playing with my FlashSystem840 and using it to replace over 1000 15K RPM HDD and what was left of our 2008 "Project Quicksilver" and make our storage management so much easier. With SVC we always need huge amounts of backend performance to ensure we are really measuring the throughput capabilities of the SVC nodes, especially with new nodes - (more of that in the coming months...) I'm not going to go over the data again, but you will be sure to have hopefully seen IBM's recent update to its FlashSystem range - the 840. Building on the amazing performance and 30 years of experience we acquired with TMS, the 840 ticks the last few boxes that were missing, mainly concurrent firmware uggrades and more up to date GUI. (Both of which in some part are running SVC code - the new control canisters basically are another instance of SVC software on another hardware platform.) I was going to post on ChrisM's post on the register regarding "what the competition said" abou our 840 product, but you don't need to read that - the key word is underlined, what did you expect them to say?! Meanwhile there has been a lot of guff said about putting SVC nodes with the FlashSystem products to provide Enterprise functions. I think most vendor guff has been because they are jealous that they don't have a product to match the capabilities of SVC, that must be why so many of them clamour to support their products behind SVC, and why almost all of the indie flash only vendors are also biting our hands off to be supported behind SVC. Lots of said guff is about cost and performance. Cost wise when purchased as the Enterprise FlashSystem, there is not additonal cost, its part of the product, and maybe those that are saying that need to also look at the base SVC costs. SVC has always been "seen" as costly - but I was in a great meeting at a customer site where an XXX (storage vendor initials removed) biggot piped up, after ignoring most of what we'd all (customer OPs team and IBM) had been discussing with the vague statement of "OK, but that SVC thing is expensive..." When the IBM account team later explained how much they were paying for SVC they realised that it was less than their software licenses for their Tier2 storage products from said XXX vendor... all of which get replaced when you insert SVC.
Anyway I digress, I wanted specifically to reply to Chri
Anyway, just a few things I wanted to clarify, and set the record straight - didn't mean to give everyone a lession in 'urban slang' nor Scottish words for rain, but there you go...
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