Barry Whyte is a 'Master Inventor' working in the Systems Group. Now based in Auckland New Zealand, Barry is working for the IBM ATS team covering Storage Virtualization for the AP region. Previously Barry was based in IBM Hursley, UK. Barry primarly works on the IBM SAN Volume Controller and Storwize family of virtual disk systems. Barry graduated from The University of Glasgow in 1996 with a B.Sc (Hons) in Computing Science. In his 20 years at IBM he has also worked on the successful Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) and the IBM DS8000 range. Barry joined the SVC development team soon after its inception and has held many positions before taking on his long running role as performance architect. In 2015 Barry moved to New Zealand, but maintains a part-time working role for the Hursley team working as a performance consultant. Outside of work, Barry enjoys playing golf and all things to do with Rotary Engines. All posts on this blog are (c) Copyright International Business Machines 2007-2016 - reproduction without prior approval is prohibited.
The "Shark" and FC-AL Years - 1998-present Last time I briefly covered the Hursley Storage team's work on the 7133 - Serial Storage Architecture products. Thanks for all the emails about this, and I'm glad people still remember it - fondly?! Those screwdrivers - and Martin, i think most... [Continue Reading]
The Serial Storage Architecture Years - 1990-1998 Its been a crazier than ever year. All will become clear soon. But one of the things I wanted to discuss with you all is just what kind of history comes with the team of ~150 storage people that I work with on a daily basis. Of course there are a... [Continue Reading]
I knew it had been a while, but I wouldn't have guessed it was 14 weeks since I last posted. Nothing much changes thought, the NetApp fan boys are being just as defensive as ever, EMC (well Mr Symm) are still spending as much time writing about IBM and its dieing products, if DS8000 had died as many... [Continue Reading]
After a couple of weeks of car hell, that resulted in the entire removal of the intake manifold, just to get to the darn crappy sensor that had packed up (and Land Rover informed me was the 3rd re-design - in any other business that would mean ' 2x faulty design) but anyway, thanks Geoff for the... [Continue Reading]
I just wanted to post a quick thanks to everyone that took the time out of their day jobs to come to Hursley yesterday for the User Group sessions. I'm hoping that everyone got as much as we did out of the day and it was great to see so many (not just UK) visitors. I've already started pushing... [Continue Reading]
Just a very quick post to remind anyone who hasn't yet registered for the first UK based SVC User Group Meeting in Hursley on the 11th May to get yer finger out. There are just a few places left for your chance to hear whats coming, and more importantly for us to hear what you want. See my original... [Continue Reading]
So after all the EMC hype, and all the claims that the DS8000 was "pushing up daises" it seems
that IBM have managed to announce the GA of ship our sub-lun hot-spot management, aka Easy Tier before EMC
have shipped their FAST function. Now, before you all jump and say EMC have been... [Continue Reading]
I wrote this a few weeks back - was waiting for the right time to post - and for once it seems Hu and I are coming from the same place! Its likely a lot of my regulars have heard of Yotta Yotta. To all extents and purposes they produced and interesting SAN cache prototype. It used lazy writes to... [Continue Reading]
I still haven't finished sorting out the photos from the German SVC User Group session I attended last month, but here is your chance to come and visit us in IBM Hursley, the home of SVC development. This event is open to SVC users, primarily in the UK, however if you fancy a trip to the UK in May... [Continue Reading]
There has been a lot of twitter banter, and blog posts about Tiering. Netapp claiming you don't need
to tier, EMC and IBM saying tiering is important and 3Par Farley going so far as to say that Netapp
can't do tiering easily, hence their response, and discussion of PAM being the way to resolve. I... [Continue Reading]
Almost a month gone by, now we are in week 9 and 7 posts, so I'm already lagging behind my resolution to post once a week at least! I do have a post in draft covering a recent trip to Mainz in Germany to meet up with the German SVC User Group. Meanwhile, pop on over to Valeries "Yin meets... [Continue Reading]
You may have already seen that SVC has yet again set a new world record benchmark when it comes to the Storage Performance Council's SPC-1 benchmark. The initial planning called for a full eight node test - as we normally do, and the manufacturing requests were put in to setup the 4000+ HDD... [Continue Reading]
Looking back through my posts its been some months since I last opened the floor to you all, so here is you chance, a free floor. Ask anything you like, about SVC of course, but if I don't know I'm sure I know someone that will. Recently I've heard some quite elaborate FUD from the usual suspects,... [Continue Reading]
I've just been through some of our detailed results for 4Q, given that we only announced availability of the new CF8 hardware back in November and exceeded expectations with their adoption. Over the quarter Tivoli Storage Software, which SVC comes under, saw double digit growth. The up-take of the... [Continue Reading]
Two posts in one week. Doing well. I set one of my resolutions this year to post at least once a week – hence my new numbering scheme. Maybe I’ll use the fact that 2010-2.2 and further double posts count for the odd week I may miss :) Benchmarketing. It’s a dodgy term, and even dodgier maths. We... [Continue Reading]
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