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Tony Pearson Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )
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My books are available on Lulu.com! Order your copies today!

Featured Redbooks and Redpapers:

  • IBM System Storage Solutions Handbook
  • IBM Software-Defined Storage Guide
  • IBM Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud Storage Solutions
  • IBM Spectrum Archive Enterprise Edition V1.2: Installation and Configuration Guide
  • IBM Spectrum Scale and ECM FileNet Content Manager Are a Winning Combination
  • IBM Spectrum Scale in an OpenStack Environment


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Disclaimer

"The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of each author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management."

(c) Copyright Tony Pearson and IBM Corporation. All postings are written by Tony Pearson unless noted otherwise.

Tony Pearson is employed by IBM. Mentions of IBM Products, solutions or services might be deemed as "paid endorsements" or "celebrity endorsements" by the US Federal Trade Commission.

This blog complies with the IBM Business Conduct Guidelines, IBM Social Computing Guidelines, and IBM Social Brand Governance. This blog is admistered by Tony Pearson and Sarochin Tollette.

Safe Harbor Statement: The information on IBM products is intended to outline IBM's general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information on the new products is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. The information on IBM products is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for IBM products remains at IBM's sole discretion.

Tony Pearson is a an active participant in local, regional, and industry-specific interests, and does not receive any special payments to mention them on this blog.

Tony Pearson receives part of the revenue proceeds from sales of books he has authored listed in the side panel.

Tony Pearson is not a medical doctor, and this blog does not reference any IBM product or service that is intended for use in the diagnosis, treatment, cure, prevention or monitoring of a disease or medical condition, unless otherwise specified on individual posts.

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Switching over from what and why

| | Comment (1) | Visits (6629)
Over the past year and a half, I have been focused on explaining WHAT IBM System Storage was, and WHY IBM should be considered when making a storage purchase decision. Let's recapsome of IBM's accomplishments during this time:
  • IBM celebrates its 50th Anniversary in Disk Systems innovation
  • IBM System Storage wins the Inaugural Brand 2007 award from Liquid Agency
  • IBM passes all major vendors in overall storage hardware
  • IBM has the fastest disk systems, including the SAN Volume Controller and DS8000 series, based on industry standard benchmarks from the Storage Performance Council
  • IBM is the first storage vendor to introduce tape encryption built into the drive

Today, October 1, I switch over to HOW to get it done. In my new job role, I will be leading a seriesof projects and workshops on how to make your data center more green, how to get more value from the information you have, how to better protect your information from unauthorized access or unethical tampering, how to develop and deploya site-wide business continuity plan, and how to centralize your management using open industry standards.

I will still be in Tucson, but am moving from building 9032 over to 9070 to be closer to the rest of my team.

If you are interested in participating in such a workshop, contact theTucson Executive Briefing Center.

technorati tags: IBM, 50 years disk, systems, innovation, Liquid Agency, Inaugural Brand, award, fastest disk, Storage Performace Council, SPC, storage, hardware, leader, tape, encryption, Tucson, Executive, Briefing, Center

[Read More]

Tags:  marketing green

Top Women in Storage

| | Visits (4399)
Byte and Switch magazine published an article on Top Women in Storage.

I thought of this as it was recently announced that Cindy Grossman, IBM VP of Tapeand Archive systems, will also serve as Site Level Manager for the IBM Tucson lab.

The motivation for the Byte and Switch article was probably from this article in Wall Street Journal detailingthe status of women in IT sales positions. Here is an excerpt:

Today, 13.5% of EMC's sales force is female, the company says, compared with 40% at International Business Machines Corp. and 29% at CA Inc., a big software vendor, those companies say. According to the 2000 U.S. census, about 25% of high-tech employees nationally were women.

IBM recognizes that diversity provides unique advantages in dealing with a global marketplace. Not only are women well represented on our IT sales force, they are also well represented on our board of directors, our Worldwide Management Committee, and our executive team overall, as well as in technical positions such as IBM Fellows, Distinguished Engineers, members of the IBM Academy of Technology. Working Mother magazine has rated IBM one of the top 10 "Best Companies" for women to work for in each of the 18 years that it has published this list.

In 2006, 51 camps called EXITE (Exploring Interests in Technology and Engineering) were held worldwide in 33 countries. The hope is to get young girls to pursue college degrees in computer science, math and engineering, so that they can then help fill the shortage of technical resources in IT.

So, if you are a women discouraged at your current place of employment, and are looking for exciting new opportunities in IT, come check out working for IBM![Read More]

Tags:  announcements

Welcome to the Super High-End Club

| | Comments (2) | Visits (9993)
I welcome HDS into the "Super High-End" club. Those who follow my blog might remember thatI suggested that analysts like IDC that use "Entry Level", "Midrange" and "Enterprise" as categoriesmay need a New Category: Super High End.

I was not surprised to see EMC, who now drops further down in perception, dispute HDS's recent SPC-1 benchmarks.Fellow blogger EMC's BarryB posted on his Storage Anarchist blog [IBM vs. Hitachi] thatpoints out that IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is still much faster, and less expensive, than USP-V.

So, just in case you haven't seen all the press releases, here is a quick recap on the results:IBM SVC 4.2 is still in first place, then HDS USP-V, then IBM System Storage DS8300. Just for comparison, I includeour IBM System Storage DS4800 midrange disk results, so you can appreciate the difference between midrange and high-end.There are other products from other vendors, I just point out a few from IBM and HDS here in this graph.

******************************************************************** 272,505 IOPS - IBM SVC 4.2
************************************************** 200,245 IOPS - HDS USP-V
******************************* 123,033 IOPS - IBM DS8300
*********** 45,014 IBM DS4800

HDS tried to come up with a phrase "Enterprise Storage System" for comparison that would leave the SVC 4.2 out.Given that the SVC has five nines (99.999%) availability, has non-disruptive upgrade and firmware update capability, has more than two processors typical of midrange products, and can connect to mainframes via z/VM, z/VSE andLinux on System z operating systems, there is no reason to pretend SVC isn't Enterprise-class.

The irony now is that EMC now looks very lonely being one of the last remaining major storage vendors not to participate in standardized benchmarks that help customers make purchase decisions, as mentioned both by IBM's BarryW: I guess that only leaves EMC, as well as HDS's Claus Mikkelsen: Olympics of Storage.

Earlier this year, EMC's Chuck Hollis opined[Storage Scorecard]that the EMC DMX and HDS TagmaStore USP were high-endboxes, which I would speculate both of these would fall somewhere between DS4800 and DS8300 on the graph above.If that is the case, it is impressive that HDS was able to re-engineer their USP-V to be 2-3x faster thanits predecessor, the USP.

Not all workloads are the same, and your mileage may vary. While I can't speak to HDS, the folks over atEMC have assured me, in writingcomments on this blog, that there is nothing preventing their customers from publishingtheir own performance comparisons between EMC and non-EMC equipment. I would encourage every customer to do this, between IBM and HDS, HDS and EMC, and between IBM and EMC, to help shed even more light on this area.In fact, you can even run your own SPC benchmarks to see how your own environment compares to the ones published.

Of course, performance is just one attribute on which to choose a storage vendor, and to choose specific products,models or features. For more information about Storage Performance Council and the SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmarks,see my week-long series on SPC benchmarks, which are listed in reverse chronological order.

Go to the official Storage Performance Council website to read the details of the SPC-1 results.

technorati tags: IBM, Super, High-End, Entry-Level, Midrange, IDC, Enterprise, HDS, USP-V, USP, EMC, SPC, SPC-1, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, DS8300, DS4800, mainframe, z/VM, z/VSE, Linux, System z, BarryB, BarryW, Chuck Hollis, SPC-2, Storage Performance Council

[Read More]

Tags:  disk

Welcome Again

| | Comment (1) | Visits (6037)
Welcome to my blog on IBM Developerworks!

I am Tony Pearson, storage consultant at the IBM Executive Briefing Center, located in Tucson, Arizona. I have degrees in Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering from the University of Arizona. Over the past 20 years, I have worked in a variety of storage roles, including development projects, product and portfolio management, testing, field support, marketing, and now am doing storage consulting.

There are a lot of things to discuss related to storage, and I am never short of opinions. As such, the standard IBM disclaimer applies: “The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.”

I have invited other IBMers to post their opinions, and when they do, their opinions may not necessarily match mine either.

This is an open two-way conversation between IBM, Business Partners, Independent Software Vendors, prospect and existing clients. I encourage everyone to post comments about our products, services, and marketing efforts.

Warm Regards,
Tony Pearson
mail[Read More]

Tags:  consulting

Certified Server and Storage Virtualization

| | Comment (1) | Visits (6134)
As BarryW points out, IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is now[fully certified with VMWare ESX 3.0.2]. Here's the [official IBM press release]. This is based onthe [Storage Virtualization Certification Program] announced by VMware last week.

This is great news for everyone. I have said before that VMware is perhaps the best product EMC offers, and some EMC bloggers have returned the favor saying that SVC might just be the best disk system that IBM offers. While IBM and EMCare heavily competitive in other aspects of the IT storage industry, when it comes to delivering what is right for the customer, we can set aside those differences. IBM is the number one reseller of VMware, and it is a great pairing with SAN Volume Controller.

Of course, it is not a free-for-all. VMware has a few restrictions at this time:

storage hardware

Disk managed by SVC must be on VMware's [Storage / SAN Compatibility GuideFor ESX Server 3.x]. As VMware certifies future storage that SVC supports, they will update the guide accordingly.

guest operating systems

The VMware certification is limited to Windows operating system, specifically those listed on its [Guest OS Guide].The list looks fairly extensive, so if you were running Windows guests on VMware to SVC today via RPQ,you are probably covered. However, if you are running NetWare or Linux, then the VMware certification doesnot yet apply.

host bus adapters

Only Qlogic host bus adapters are supported at this time. This is because VMware directly communicates to the host bus adapters as part of its "I/O virtualization" capabilities, and needs to work with or test with all the other HBA manufacturers.

no RDM support

Raw Device Mapping (RDM) mode is currently not yet supported. This probably will only affect a small percentage of customers, as I don't know of any major applications that require this.

Of course, most of these issues can probably be addressed with additional testing, or minor software changes, and IBM will work with VMware to prioritize what added testing or software changes are needed to expand this support.

technorati tags: IBM, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, EMC, VMware, ESX, Server, Storage, Virtualization, Certification, Program, Windows, NetWare, Linux, RDM, HBA

[Read More]

Tags:  disk
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