Today marks the next phase, or the beginning of a series of announcements, previews and strategy updates from IBM Storage. The splash page for todays launch is over on the storage news pages - this includes R4.3 of DS8000, adding thin provisioning for open systems and mutli-track support for System...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  ds8000 storage dynamic_infrastructure svc xiv information_infrastructur...

These days I'm spending more and more of my time with customers visiting Hursley wanting to hear about our smart planet initiatives, how we can help to make their infrastructure dynamic and of course most of my involvement in this is around presenting how and where SVC and storage...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  dynamic_infrastructure smart_planet green svc storage virtualization

With the move to the new blog software, there is probably a bunch of you that found yourself here, not knowing what this post was going to contain - as well as my regulars that either reap the benefits of SVC every day, or know the patter , but may not know all the benefits. I liken SVC to a mobile...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  green svc dynamic+infrastructure abstraction virtualization storage smart+planet

I thought it was worth spending a few minutes describing a feature that SVC has been supporting for just over a year now. Call it what you want, "Split Cluster", "Split I/O Group", "Hyper-swap", "Pork" (Sorry HAM). After HDS made such a wet fish splash...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  split+cluster vdisk+mirror storage virtualization usp svc

On the 23rd and 24th July IBM invites you to attend The Dynamic Infrastructure Worldwide Virtual Forum an online event where you will be able to : Attend interactive sessions of your choice; Visit product exhibits; Get your questions answered; and  Join the live chat with experts Register Now The...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  diforum dynainf storage virtualization svc

As you may have noticed, they've moved us all over to the new MyDeveloperWorks website. Still getting to grips with it myself, need to get my profile pics and stuff copied over, but the redirect URL is in place already!!! All my hit counts are gone, the technorati score and everything else...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  svc storage

As we approach SVC's 6th birthday its interesting to see the rest of the industry starting to catch up and realise not only that a modular commodity storage controller is the way forward, but that also clustering of said modular controllers has many benefits.     We all await todays...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  hdd in-band symmetrix usp-v hds emc ssd storage ibm usp svc hp dmx disk performance invista

The "modular monolith" has arrived. Oh how the EMC spin doctors must have jumped for joy when they realised the next version of the almost 20 year old Symmetrix family, the DMX-5 could also mean DMX-V in roman numerals. Better still lets try and jazz it up furter, how about DMX V-"Max". Oh how...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  svc storage dmx invista emc virtualization

I've been head down for the last few weeks, getting a chance to enhance a chunk of code in the middle of the SVC code stack for the next release, the cache. SVC caching is based on an LRU (Least Recently Used) cache model with partitioning added to make things cope with differing capabilities of the...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  storage svc ibm

Funny, I had been thinking about blogging about a customer visit I had this week, primarily a new SVC user wanting to discuss and go into some deeper technical insight into the product. I enjoy these days as its a chance to talk techy with someone who is actually using and hopefully benefiting from...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  svc usp storage ibm

Following last Septembers "Information Infrastructure" launch, IBM today announced wave two subtitled Dynamic Infrastructure . The press release covers some of the higher level details, and a new "DI" portal has been created on the IBM website. From a disk and storage perspective the DS8000 gets...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  ssd ibm ds8000 storage sata svc

It seems a common thread in technology blogs to post some predictions for the coming year. However, as I'm not an analyst and don't profess to understand the entire storage industry, I thought I'd keep to a brief history of 2008 as I saw it - obviously with an IBM and SVC slant on things. This isn't...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  storage cloud svc ssd ibm dmx

In the final part of my 'How it Works' series I'm looking at upgrades. Both software and hardware. Maintenance Windows As the world has moved to a 24x7x52 culture, nobody can really afford many, if any, 'maintenance windows' these days. I described in part2 that to move from a non-virtual to a...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  virtualization svc ibm storage disk

In part 1 of this series I covered the terminology of SVC. Part 2 showed how you would introduce existing volumes into a virtualized environment using SVC. In part 3 I cover the 'now what'... Making the most of it Once you have imported the data, you now have a set of disks that are simply running...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  ibm disk virtualization storage svc