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]


Tags:  performance svc ibm storage virtualization

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]


Tags:  storage svc

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]


Tags:  performance ds8000 virtualization spc storage svc

 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]


Tags:  virtrualization storage svc ssd

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]


Tags:  virtualization storage ibm svc cf8 ssd

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]


Tags:  spc emc performance storage ibm svc

A lot of you may have seen the NASA satellite photo of the UK last week, certainly you can't deny that the snow has hit pretty much the whole country, the contrast compared to a normal satellite image is quite amazing. Images courtesy of NEODAAS/University of Dundee While most of last week I was...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  snow ibm hursley

 Happy New Year to all. As you may know, or have seen the UK is currently under the grip of winter. A few inches of snow and the country comes to a stand-still. Maybe I'm getting old an cynical (some may say no maybe about it!) but I do remember walking to school in drifts of over 2 foot back in...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  tiering svc performance virtualization ibm cf8 snow stroage

 As this is my last day in the office until the new year, I thought I'd take a few minute to quickly wish all my readers all the best over the Festive season. I've already set one of my new year resolutions to make time to blog more - so all being well, I'll be more active on here next year,...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  svc ibm storage hursley

 I know, I know,.... Or even I know I haven't posted enough when I caught up with a few customers this week and they all comment - "your blog has been quiet, a good few indepth posts, but not the usual post rates" I won't give any excuses, you've heard them all before, but I have actually...   [Continue Reading]

The kids very kindly passed on their latest 'bring-home' from school - a stinking cold! Been feeling pretty rotten since I got back from SNWE in Frankfurt a couple of weeks back - so hopefully I didn't pass it on to anyone I met there! Was a great couple of days, thanks to everyone that came...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  space+efficient virtualization svc storage ssd cache

So far I have concentrated on the hardware side of the new SVC 5.1 release, thats probably because after the work I did with IBM Almaden Research last year on Project Quicksilver, I became the architect for the sub-SVC project to add SSD support to SVC. The tecnology demo set the scene and...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  mirroring ssd virtualization svc storage enterprise

My posts from last week have been generating a huge amount of interest, with customers both existing an prospective seeing that what we have done with SVC 5.1 and our intergrated SSD support is much more of a game changer than EMC's "bolt them into the array" approach. While IBM has the same...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  enterprise svc ds8000 storage ssd

This is a bit of an opus I'm afraid, but I've had my hands tied for so long in what I could / couldn't say so think of this as a catch up for my last 6 months of sporadic posting! Please do try to make it to the end, I'm covering a lot here! In my last post I covered whats coming with SVC 5.1 at a...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  ssd storage svc virtualization cf8