Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

IBM announced agreements with Brocade, Cisco and Juniper Networks to help build more dynamic infrastructures. An IBM study estimates that the "digital footprint" of each person will grow from 1TB today to 16TB by the year 2020, and all of that data will need bandwidth to get around.IBM’s Data Center Networking (DCN) Initiative is focused on providing clients with solutions to address these three key areas in networking:

• Partner for choice of networking products based and open standards to ensure clients can select from a full range of hardware options for data center networks. IBM will build on its strong partnerships with leading networking vendors to provide greater customer choice.

• Integrate with IBM Data Center Products and Services. IBM continues to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of services for network design, integration and management from IBM Global Technology Services (GTS).

• IBM differentiates itself with Common Data Center Management, where we can bring together software products, such as IBM Systems Director and Tivoli portfolio, to create what we refer to as a "Unified Service Management" software platform.

Here's a sample of what IBM announced:

Brocade

IBM continues its strategic support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) with a Converged B32 switch, and Converged Network Adapters (CNA) for IBM System x servers. A CNA card does the job of both the Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC) as well as the Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA), reducing the number of cables from each server.

Cisco

IBM and its Business Partners will resell the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches, a leading family of high-performance, low-latency switches for data center networks supporting lossless 10GbE, Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Juniper Networks

IBM will OEM selected Juniper EX and MX switches and routers. This expands upon IBM and Juniper's long-term relationship that includes a reseller agreement with IBM Global Technology Services, collaboration on Juniper's Stratus Project, and IBM's ten worldwide Cloud Labs.

For more details, see the IBM [Press Release].

technorati tags: IBM, Brocade, Cisco, Juniper Networks, FCoE, DCN, CNA, NIC, HBA, Nexus 5000, 10GbE, GTS

Today we had several for the IBM System Storage product line. Here are some of them:

DS8000 gets thinner, leaner and faster

The 4.3 level of microcode for the IBM System Storage DS8000 series disk systems [announced enhancements] for both fixed block architecture (FBA) LUNs and count key data (CKD) volumes.

For FBA LUNs that attach to Linux, UNIX and Windows distributed systems, IBM announced DS8000 Thin Provisioning native support. Of course, many people already had this by putting IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) in front, but now DS8000 clients out there without SVC can also achieve benefits ofthin provisioning. This support also improves quick initialization a whopping 2.6 times faster.

For CKD volumes attached to z/OS on System z mainframes, IBM announced zHPF multitrack support for z/OS 1.9 and above. zHPF provide high performance FICON performance, and can now handle multitrack I/O transfers foreven better performance for zFS, HFS, PDSE, and extended striped data sets.

XIV gets better connected

A lot of XIV[announced enhancements] and preview announcements centered around better connectivity. Here's a run down:

• Better host attachment connectivity by beefing up the interface modules that hold the FCP and iSCSI interface cards. XIV disk arrays have 3 to 6 of these in different configurations, and since they manage both their own disks,as well as receive host I/O requests for other disks, are basically doing double-duty.These interface modules can now be ordered as [Dual-CPU] modules.
• Better infrastructure management by connecting XIV with the industry standard SMI-S interface to IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. Now, XIV can be part of the single pane of glass console that manages all of your other disk arrays, tape libraries and SAN fabrics.
• Better copy services for backups by connecting XIV with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Advanced Copy Services. TSM for Advanced Copy Services is application aware and can coordinate XIV Snapshots similar to its current support for SVC and DS8000 FlashCopy capabilities.
• Better connectivity to security systems by supporting LDAP credentials. Before, you had individual userid and passwords for each XIV, and these were probably different than all the other userid/password combinations you have for every other box on your data center floor. IBM is working on getting all products to support theLightweight Directory Access Protocol, or [LDAP] so that we can reach the nirvana of "single sign-on",one userid/password per administrator for all IT devices in the company.
• Better support with flexible warranty periods and non-disruptive code load options.
• Better remote copy support by connecting to sites far, far away. IBM previewed that it will provideasynchronous disk mirroring from one XIV to another XIV natively. Before this, XIV's synchronous mirroring was limited to 300km distances. Many of our clients do long distance global mirroring of their XIV today behind an SVC, but again, for those out there that don't yet have an SVC, this can be a reasonable alternative.

TS7650 ProtecTIER data deduplication appliance now offers "no dedupe" option

In what some might consider a surprising move, IBM announced a "no dedupe" licensing option on their premiere deduplication solution, which somewhat reminds me of IBM's NOCOPY option on DS8000 FlashCopy. At first I thought "Are you kidding me?!?!" However, this new license option allows the TS7650 appliance to compete with other virtual tape libraries (VTL) that do not offer deduplication capability on an even playing field. It also allows TS7650 to be used for data that doesn'tdedupe very well, such as seismic recordings, satellite images, or what have you. There are also clients who do not yet feel comfortable to dedupe their financial records for compliance reasons.This option now allows IBM to withdraw from marketing the TS7530 non-dedupe library. Having one technology thatdoes both dedupe and no-dedupe is better than offering two separate libraries based on different technologies.

The ProtecTIER series also announced [IP remote distance replication]. This can be used to replicate virtualtape cartridges in one ProtecTIER over to another ProtecTIER at a remote location. You can decide to replicateall or just a subset of your virtual tapes, and this feature can be used to migrate, merge or split ProtecTIERconfigurations as your needs grow. Before this support, our TS7650G clients replicated the disk repositoryusing native disk array replication technology, such as Global Mirror on the DS8000, but that meant that all data was replicated over to the secondary site. Now, with this new IP replication feature, you can be selective, and replicate only those virtual tapes that are mission critical.

The appliance now supports up to 36TB of disk capacity, and the new "IBM i" operating system on System i servers,formerly known as i5/OS.

GPFS does Windows

IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) has the lion's marketshare of file systems used in the [Top 500 Supercomputers]. For a while, it was limited to just Linux and AIX operating system support, but version 3.3 [extends this to Windows 2008 on 64-bit architectures]. GPFS isthe file system used in IBM's Scale-Out File Services, the underlying technology of IBM's Cloud Computing and Storage offerings.

To learn more, here is the IBM[Press Release] and[Webcast].

technorati tags: IBM, DS8000, thin provisioning, Linux, UNIX, Windows, zHPF, z/OS, XIV, SMI-S, asynchronous mirroring, TSM, LDAP, SVC, TS7650, deduplication, dedupe, replication, GPFS, supercomputers, cloud computing, cloud storage, burning man

This week I am in Chicago for the IBM Storage and Storage Networking Symposium, which coincides with the System x and BladeCenter Technical Conference. This allows the 800 attendees to attend both storage or server presentations at their convenience. There were hundreds of sessions, over 20 time slots, so for each time slot, you have 15 or so topics to choose from.Mike Kuhn kicked off the series of keynote sessions. Here's my quick recap of each one:

Curtis Tearte, General Manager, IBM System Storage

Curtis replaced Andy Monshaw as General Manager for IBM System Storage. His presentation focused on how storage fits into IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure strategy. Some interesting points:

• a billion camera-enabled cell phones were sold in 2007, compared to 450 million in 2006.
• IBM expects that there will be 2 billion internet users by 2011, as well as trillions of "things".
• In the US, there were 2.2 million medical pharmacy dispensing errors resulting for handwritten prescriptions.
• Time wasted looking for parking spaces in Los Angeles consumed 47,000 gallons of gasoline, and generated 730 tons of carbon dioxide.
• In the US, 4.2 billion hours are lost, and 2.9 billion gallons of gas consumed, due to traffic congestion.
• Over the past decade, servers went from 8 watts to 100 watts per $1000 US dollars.
• Data growth appears immune to the economic recession. The digital footprint per person is expected to grow from 1TB today to over 15TB by 2020.
• 10 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded every minute.
• Bank of China manages 380 million bank accounts, processing over 10,000 transactions per second.

At the end of the session, Curtis transitioned from demonstrating his knowledge and passion of storage to his knowledge and passion in his favorite sport: baseball. Chicago is home to both the Cubs and the White Sox.

Roland Hagan, Vice President Business Line Executive, System x

IBM sets the infrastructure agenda for the entire industry. The Dynamic Infrastructure initiative is not just IT, but a complete end-to-end view across all of the infrastructures in play, including transportation, manufacturing, services and facilities.Companies spent over $60 billion US dollars on servers last year. Of these, 53 percent for x86-based servers, 9 percent for Itanium-based, 26 percent for RISC-based (POWER6, SPARC, etc.), and 11 percent mainframe. Theeconomic downturn has impacted revenues, but the percentages continue about the same.

The dominant deployment model remains one application per server. As a result, power, cooling and management costs have grown tremendously. There are system admins opposed to consolidating server images with VMware, Hyper-V, Xen or other server virtualizaition technologies. Roland referred to these admins as "server huggers".To help clients adopt cloud computing technologies, IBM introduced [Cloudburst] appliances. IBM plans to offer specialized versions for developers, for service providers, and for enterprises.

IBM's Enterprise-X Architecture is what differentiates IBM's x86-based servers from all the competitors, surrounding Intel and AMD processors with technology that provides distinct advantages. For example, to support server virtualization, IBM's eX4 provides support for more memory, which often is more critical than CPU resources when deploying large number of guest OS images. IBM System x servers have an integrated management module (IMM) and was the first to change over from BIOS to the new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface [UEFI] standard.

IBM servers offer double the performance, consume half the power, and cost a third less to manage, than comparably priced servers from competitors. Of the top 20 more energy efficient server deployments, 19 are from IBM. Roland cited customer reference SciNet, a 4000-server supercomputer with 30,000 cores based on IBM [iDataPlex] servers. At 350 TeraFLOPs it is ranked #16 fastest supercomputer in the world, and #1 in Canada. With apower usage effectiveness (PUE) less than 1.2, it also is very energy efficient. This means that for every 12 watts of electricity going in to the data center, 10 watts are used for servers, storage and networking gear, andonly 2 watts used for power and cooling. Traditional data centers have PUE around 2.5, consuming 25 watts total for every 10 watts used by servers, storage and networking gear.

Clod Barrera, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Technical Strategist for IBM System Storage

Clod presented trends and directions for disk and tape technology, disk and tape systems, and the direction towards cloud computing.

Whew! A lot to think about!

technorati tags: IBM, Chicago, Storage Symposium, System x, BladeCenter, Curtis Tearte, Roland Hagan,Andy Monshaw, baseball, Intel, AMD, IMM, UEFI, supercomputer, PUE, Clod Barrera, SciNet, Canada

Continuing my week in Chicago for the IBM Storage and Storage Networking Symposium and System x and BladeCenter Technical Conference, I presented a variety of topics.

Hybrid Storage for a Green Data Center

The cost of power and cooling has risen to be a #1 concern among data centers. I presented the following hybrid storage solutions that combine disk with tape. These provide the best of both worlds, the high performance access time of disk with the lower costs and reduced energy consumption of tape.

• IBM [System Storage DR550] - IBM's Non-erasable, Non-rewriteable (NENR) storage for archive and compliance data retention
• IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution [GMAS] - IBM's multi-site grid storage for PACS applications and electronic medical records[EMR]
• IBM Scale-out File Services [SoFS] - IBM's scalable NAS solution that combines a global name space with a clustered GPFS file system, serving as the ideal basis for IBM's own[Cloud Computing and Storage] offerings

Not only do these help reduce energy costs, they provide an overall lower total cost of ownership (TCO) thantraditional WORM optical or disk-only storage configurations.

The Convergence of Networks - Understanding SAN, NAS and iSCSI in the Data Center Network

This turned out to be my most popular session. Many companies are at a crossroads in choosing data and storage networking solutions in light of recent announcements from IBM and others. In the span of 75 minutes, I covered:

• Block storage concepts, storage virtualization and RAID levels
• File system concepts, how file systems map files to block storage
• Network Attach Storage, the history of the NFS and CIFS protocols, Pros and Cons of using NAS
• Storage Area Networks, the history of SAN protocols including ESCON, FICON and FCP, Pros and Cons of using SAN
• IP SAN technologies, iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Pros and Cons of using this approach
• Network Convergence with Infiniband and Fibre Channel over Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (FCoCEE), why Infiniband was not adopted historically in the marketplace as a storage protocol, and the features and enhancements of Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) needed to merge NAS, SAN and iSCSI traffic onto a single converged data center network [DCN]

Yes, it was a lot of information to cover, but I managed to get it done on time.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center version 4.1 Overview and Update

In conferences like these, there are two types of product-level presentations. An "Overview" explains howproducts work today to those who are not familiar with it. An "Update" explains what's new in this version of the product for those who are already familiar with previous releases. I decided to combine these into one sessionfor IBM's new version of [Tivoli Storage Productivity Center].I was one of the original lead architects of this product many years ago, and was able to share many personalexperiences about its evolution in development and in the field at client facilities.Analysts have repeatedly rated IBM Productivity Center as one of the top Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools available in the marketplace.

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Overview

Can you believe I have been doing ILM since 1986? I was the lead architect for DFSMS which provides ILM support for z/OS mainframes. In 2003-2005, I spent 18 months in the field performingILM assessments for clients, and now there are dozens of IBM practitioners in Global Technology Services andSTG Lab Services that do this full time. This is a topic I cover frequently at the IBM Executive Briefing Center[EBC], because it addressesseveral top business challenges:

1. Reducing costs and simplifying management
2. Improving efficiency of personnel and application workloads
3. Managing risks and regulatory compliance

IBM has a solution based on five "entry points". The advantage of this approach is that it allows our consultants to craft the right solution to meet the specific requirements of each client situation. These entry points are:

• Enterprise Content Management [ECM]
• Tiered Information Infrastructure - we don't limit ourselves to just "Tiered Storage" as storage is only part of a complete[information infrastructure] of servers,networks and storage
• Storage Optimization and Virtualization - including virtual disk, virtual tape and virtual file solutions
• Process Enhancement and Automation - an important part of ILM are the policies and procedures, such as IT Infrastructure Library [ITIL] best practices
• Archive and Retention - space management and data retention solutions for email, database and file systems

I did not get as many attendees as I had hoped for this last one, as I was competing head-to-head in the same time slot as Lee La Frese covering IBM's DS8000 performance with Solid State Disk (SSD) drives, John Sing covering Cloud Computing and Storage with SoFS, and Eric Kern covering IBM Cloudburst.

I am glad that I was able to make all of my presentations at the beginning of the week, so that I can then sit back and enjoy the rest of the sessions as a pure attendee.

technorati tags: IBM, Symp09, storage symposium, hybrid storage, DR550, NENR, WORM, GMAS, SoFS, PACS, EMR, NAS, GPFS, SAN, iSCSI, FCoE, FCoCEE, CEE, DCN, TCO, RAID, ESCON, FICON, Infiniband, Tivoli, Productivity Center, ILM, virtualization, ITIL, DS8000, SSD, Cloudburst, Information Infrastructure

Continuing my week in Chicago, I decided to attend some of the presentations from the System x side. This is the advantage of running both conferences in the same hotel, attendees can choose how many of each they want to participate in.

Wayne Wigley, IBM Advanced Technical Support (ATS), presented a series of presentations on different server virtualization offerings available for System x and BladeCenter servers. I am very familiar with virtualization implemented on System z mainframes, as well as IBM's POWER systems, and have working knowledge of Linux KVM and Xen, so I was well prepared to handle hearing the latest about Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware's Vsphere version 4.

Microsoft Hyper-V 2008

Hyper-V can run as part of Windows 2008, are standalone on its own.Different levels of Windows 2008 include licenses for different number of Windows virtual machines (VMs).Windows Server 2008 Standard includes 1 Windows VM, Enterprise includes 4 Windows VMs, and the Datacenter edition includes unlimited number of Windows VMs. If you want to run more Window VMs than come included, you need to pay extra for each additional one. For example, to run 10 Windows VMs on a 2-socket server would cost about $9000 US dollars on Standard but only $6000 US dollars on Datacenter edition (list prices from Microsoft Web site).

Unlike VMware, which takes a monolithic approach as hypervisor, Hyper-V is more like Xen with a microkernelized approach. This means you need a "parent" guest OS image, and the rest of the Guest OS images are then considered "child" images.These child images can be various levels of Windows, from Windows XP Pro to Windows Server 2008, Xen-enabled Linux, or even a non-hypervisor-aware OS.The "parent" guest OS image provides networking and storage I/O services to these "child" images.For the hypervisor-aware versions of Windows and Linux, Hyper-V allows optimized access to the hypervisor, "synthetic devices", and hypercalls. Synthetic devices present themselves as network devices, but only serve to pass data along the VMBus to other networking resources. This process does not require software emulation, and therefore offers higher performance for virtual machines and lower host system overhead.For non-hypervisor-aware OS images, Hyper-V provides device emulation through the "parent" image, which is slower.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) can manage both Hyper-V and VMware VI3 images.Wayne showed various screen shots of the GUI available to manage Hyper-V images.In standalone mode, you lose the nice GUI and management console.

Hyper-V supports external, internal and private virtual LANs (VLAN). External means that VMs can communicate with the outside world over standard ethernet connections. Internal means that VMs can communicate with "parent" and "child" guest images on the same server only. Private means that only "child" guests can communicate with other "child" images.

Hyper-V supports disk attached via IDE, SATA, SCSI, SAS, FC, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS. One mode is "Virtual Hard Disk" (VHD) similar to VMware VMDK files. The other is "pass through" mode, which are actual disk LUNs accessed natively. VHDs can be dynamic (thin provisioned), fixed (fully allocated), or differencing. The concept of differencing is interesting, as you start with a base read-only VHD volume image, and have a separate "delta" file that contains changes from the base image.

Some of the key features of Hyper-V 2008 are:

• Being able to run concurrently 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Linux and Windows guest images
• Support for 64 GB of memory and 4-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) per VM
• Clustering for High Availability and Quick Migration of VM images
• Live backup with integration with Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS)
• Virtual LAN (VLAN) support, and Virtual and Pass-through physical disk support
• A clever VMbus, virtual service parent/client approach to sharing hardware
• Optimized performance options for hypervisor-aware versions of Windows and Linux, and emulated supportfor non-hypervisor-aware OS images.

VMware Vsphere v4.0

This was titled as an "Overview" session, but really was an "Update" session on the newest features of this release. The big change appears to be that VMware added "v" in front of everything.

• Under vCompute, there are some new features on VMware's Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) which includes recommended VM migrations. Dynamic Power Management (DPM) will move VMs during periods of low usageto consolidate onto fewer physical servers so as to reduce energy consumption.

• Under vStorage, vSphere introduces an enhanced Plugable Storage Architecture (PSA), with supportfor Storage Array Type Plugins (SATP) and Path Selection Plugins (PSP). This vStorage API allows forthird party plugins for improved fault-tolerance and complex I/O load balancing algorithms. This releasealso has improved support for iSCSI, including Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) support.Similar to Hyper-V's dynamic VHD, VMware supports "thin provisioning" for their virtual disk VMDK files.A feature of "Storage Vmotion" allows conversion between "thick" and "thin" provisioning formats.

  The vStorage API for Data Protection provide all the features of VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB). The APIprovides full, incremental and differential file-level backups for Windows and Linux guests, including supportfor snapshots and Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) quiescing.

  VMware introduces direct I/O pass-through for both NIC and HBA devices. While thisallows direct access to SAN-attached LUNs similar to Hyper-V, you lose a lot of features like Vmotion, High Availability and Fault Tolerance. Wayne felt that these restrictions are temporary, that hopefully VMwarewill resolve this over the next 12 months.

• Under vNetwork, VMware has virtual LAN switches called vSwitches. This includes support for IPv6and VLAN offloading.

The vSphere server can now run with up to 1TB of RAM and 64 logical CPUs to support up to 320 VM guest images.Each VM can have up to 255GB RAM and up to 8-way SMP.Vsphere ESX 4 introduces a new virtual hardware platform called VM Hardware v7. While Vsphere 4.0 can run VMs from ESX 2 and ESX 3, the problem is if you have new VMs based on this newer VM Hardware v7, you cannot run them on older ESX versions.

Vsphere comes in four sizes: Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus, ranging in list price from $795 US dollars to $3495 US dollars.

While IBM is the #1 reseller of VMware, we also are proud to support Hyper-V, Xen, KVM and other similar products.Analysts expect most companies will have two or more server virtualization solutions in their data center, and it is good to see that IBM supports them all.

technorati tags: IBM, Wayne Wigley, ATS, Hyper-V, Microsoft, SCVMM, SMP, VLAN, VMware, DRS, DPM, Vsphere, Vmotion, Xen, KVM, Linux, Windows, server virtualization

Continuing my week in Chicago, for the IBM Storage Symposium 2009, I attended what in my opinion was the bestsession of the week. This was by a guy named Chip Copper, who covered IBM's set of Ethernet and Fibre Channelnetworking gear. Attributes are the four P's:

• Performance, non-blocking
• Port density
• Power and Cooling (electricity usage)
• Price

Equipment comes in two flavors: Top-of-Rack (ToR) thin pizza box switches, and Middle-of-Row (MoR) much larger directors.The MoR directors are engineered for up to 50Gbps per half-slot, so 10GbE and the future 40GbE can be easily accommodated in a single half-slot, and the future 100GbE can be done with a full slot (two half-slots).

While many companies might have been contemplating the switch from copper wires to optical fiber, there is a new reason for copper cables: Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). Many IP-phones, digital video surveillance cameras, and other equipment can have a single cable that delivers both signal and electricity over copper. If you have already deployed optical fiber throughout the building, there are "last mile" options where the signals are converted to copper wires and electrical energy added for these types of devices.

Two directors can be connected together with Inter-Chassis Link (ICL) cables to make them look like a single director with twice the number of ports. These are different than Inter-Switch Links (ISL) as they are not counted as an extra "hop" for networking counting purposes, especially important for FICON usage.

Today, we have 1Gbps, 2Gbps, 4Gbps and 8Gbps Fibre Channel. Since these all use 10-for-8 encoding (10 bits represents one 8-bit byte), then in was easy to calculate throughput: 8Gpbs was 800 MB/sec, for example. Auto-negotiation between speeds is not done at the HBA card, switch or director blade itself, but in the Short Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) optical connector. However, you can only auto-negotiate if the encoding matches. The 4/2/1 SFP can run at 4Gbps or auto-negotiate to slower 2Gbps and 1Gbps. The 8/4/2 SFP can run at 8Gbps, or auto-negotiate down to slower 4Gpbs and 2Gbps. Folks who still have legacy 1Gbps equipment, but want to run some things at 8 Gbps, can buy 8Gbps-capable switches or director blades, but then put some 4/2/1 SFPs into them. These 4/2/1 SFP are cheaper, so this might be something to consider if budgets are tight. Some SFPs handle up to 10km distances, but others only 4km, so be careful not to order the wrong ones.

Unfortunately, there are proposals in place for 10Gbps and 40Gbps that would use a different 66-for-64 encoding (66 bits represent 8 bytes), so 10Gbps would be 1200 MB/sec. These are used today for ISL between directors and switches.In theory, the 40Gbps could auto-negotiate down to 10Gbps, but not to any of the 8/4/2/1 Gbps that use different 10-for-8 encoding.

For those who cannot afford a SAN768B, there is a smaller SAN384B that can carry: 192 ports (4Gpbs/2Gbps), 128 ports (8Gbps) or 24 ports (10Gbps). The SAN384B can be ICL connected to another SAN384B or even the SAN768B as your needs grow.

On the entry-level side, the SAN24B-4 offers a feature called "Access Gateway". This makes the SAN24B look like an SAN end-point host, rather than a switch, and makes initial deployment of integrated bundled solutions easier. Once connected to everything, you can convert it over to full "switch" mode.The SAN40B-4 and SAN80B-4 provide midrange level support, including Fibre Channel routing at the 8Gbps level. In fact, all 8Gbps ports include routing capability. IBM offers both single-port and dual-port 8Gbps host bus adapter (HBA) cards to connect to these switches. These HBA offer 16 virtual channels per port, so that if you have VMware running many guests, or want to connect both disk and tape to the same HBA, you can keep the channel traffic separate for Quality of Service (QoS).

Chip wrapped up his session to discuss Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and explained why we need to have a loss-less Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) to meet the needs of storage traffic as well as traditional Fibre Channel does today. IBM offers all of the equipment you need to get started today on this FCoCEE, with Converged Network Ethernet cards for your System x servers, and a new SANB32 that has 24 10GbE CEE ports and 8 traditional 8Gbps FC ports. This means that you can put the CNA card in your existing servers, connect to this switch, and then connect to your existing 10GbE LAN and your existing 8Gpbs or 4Gpbs FC-based SAN to the rest of your storage devices.

Worried that the FCoE or CEE standards could change after you deploy this gear? Aren't most LAN and SAN switches based on Application-specific integrated circuit [ASIC] chips which are created in the factory? Don't worry, IBM's equipment have put all the standards-vulnerable portions of the logic into separate Field-programmable gate array [FPGA] that can be updated with simplya firmware upgrade. This is future-proofing I can agree with!

technorati tags: IBM, Brocade, Chip Copper, Ethernet, FC, FICON, FCP, DCN, ToR, MoR, PoE, HBA, ISL, ICL, SAN384B, SAN768B, SAN24B, SAN40B, SAN80B, SANB32, QoS, VMware, CEE, FCoE, FCoCEE

Continuing my week in Chicago, for the IBM Storage Symposium 2008, I attended several sessions intended to answer the questions of the audience. In an effort to be cute, the System x team have a "Meet the xPerts" session at their System x and BladeCenter Technical Conference, so the storage side decided to do the same. Traditionally, these have been called "Birds of a Feature", "Q&A Panel", or "Free-for-All". They allow anyone to throw out a question, and have the experts in the room, either IBM, Business Partner or another client, answer the question from their experience.

Meet the Experts - Storage for z/OS environments

Here were some of the questions answered:

1. I've seen terms like "z/OS", "zSeries" and "System z" used interchangeably, can you help clarify what this particular session is about? IBM's current mainframe servers are all named "System z", such as our System z9 or System z10. These replace the older zSeries models of hardware. z/OS is one of the six operating systems that run on this hardware platform. The other five are z/VM, z/VSE, z/TPF, Linux and OpenSolaris. The focus of this session will be storage attached and used for z/OS specifically, including discussions of Omegamon and DFSMS software products.
   
2. What can we do to reduce our MIPS-based software licensing costs from our third party vendors? Consider using IBM System z Integrated Information Processor [zIIP] engines.
   
3. What about 8 Gbps FICON? IBM has already announced [FICON Express8] host bus adapter (HBA) cards, that will auto-negotiate to 4Gbps and 2Gbps speeds. If you don't need full 8Gbps speed now, you can still get the Express8 cards, but put 4/2/1 Gbps SFP ports instead. Currently, LongWave (LW) is only supported to 4km at 8Gbps speed.
   
4. I want to use Global Mirror for my DS8100 to my remote DS8100, but also make test copies of my production data to an older ESS 800 I have locally. Any suggestions? Yes, consider using FlashCopy to simplify this process.
   
5. I have Global Mirror (GM) running now successfully with DSCLI, and now want to deploy IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication. Is that possible? Yes, Productivity Center for Replication will detect existing GM relationships, and start managing them.
   
6. I have already deployed HyperPAV and zHPF, is there any value in getting Solid-State Drives as well? HyperPAV and zHPF impact CONN time, but SSD impacts DISC time, so they are mutually complementary.
   
7. How should I size my FlashCopy SE pool? SE refers to "Space Efficient", which stores only the changes between the source and destination copies of each LUN or CKD volume involved. General recommendation is to start with 20 percent and adjust accordingly.
   
8. How many RAID ranks should I configure per DS8000 extent pool? IBM recommends 4 to 8 ranks per pool.
   

Meet the Experts: Storage for Linux, UNIX and Windows distributed systems

This session was focused on storage systems attached to distributed servers, as well as products from Tivoli used to manage them. Here were some of the questions answered:

1. When we migrated from Tivoli Storage Manager v5 to v6, we lost our favorite "Operational Reporting" tool. How can we get TOR back? You now get the new Tivoli Common Reporting tool.
   
2. How can we identify appropriate port distribution for multiple SVC node pairs for load balancing? IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v4.1 has hot-spot analysis with recommendations for Vdisk migrations.
3. We tried TotalStorage Productivity Center way back when, but the frequent upgrades were killing us. How has it been lately? It has been much more stable since v3.3, and completely renamed to Tivoli Storage Productivity Center to avoid association with versions 1 and 2 of the predecessor product. The new "lightweight agents" feature of v4.1 resolve many of the problems you were experiencing.
4. We have over 1600 SVC virtual disks, how do we handle this in IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center? Use the Filter capability in combination with clever naming conventions for your virtual disks.
5. How can we be clever when we are limited to only 15 characters? Ok. We understand.
6. We are currently using an SSPC with Windows 2003 and 2GB memory, but we are only using the Productivity Center for Replication feature of it. Can we move the DB2 database over to a Windows 2008 server with 4GB of memory? Consider using the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication software instead of SSPC for special circumstances like this.
7. We love the XIV GUI, how soon will all other IBM storage products have it also? As with every acquisition, IBM evaluates if there are technologies from new products that can be carried back to existing products.
8. We are currently using 12 ports on our existing XIV, and love it so much we plan to buy a second frame, but are concerned about consuming another 12 ports on our SAN switch. Any suggestions? Yes, use only six ports per frame. Just because you have more ports, doesn't mean you are required to use them.
9. We have heard there are concerns from the legal community about using deduplication technology, any ideas how to address that? Nobody here in the room is a lawyer, and you should consult legal counsel for any particular situation. None of the IBM offerings intended for non-erasable, non-rewriteable (NENR) data retention records (DR550, WORM tape, N series SnapLock) support dedupe today, and none of IBM's deduplication offerings (TS7650,N series A-SIS,TSM) make any claims for fit-for-purpose for compliance regulatory storage. However, be assured that all of IBM's dedupe technology involves byte-for-byte comparisons so that you never lose any data due to false hash collisions. For all IBM compliance storage, what you write will be read back in the correct sequence of ones and zeros.

technorati tags: IBM, z/OS, System z, DFSMS, Omegamon, z/VM, z/VSE, z/TPF, Linux, OpenSolaris, Tivoli, Storage Manager, TSM, Productivity Center, SVC, XIV, GUI, WORM, DR550, NENR, SnapLock, A-SIS

(If you have not been to California beaches lately, here's a quick [video] reminder)

So the big news this week is that the auction over Data Domain is over, and EMC's bid finally won over NetApp. Both NetApp and EMC have data deduplication capabilities in their existing product lines, but neither could compete against IBM's TS7650G ProtecTIER Data Deduplication gateway and TS7650 ProtecTIER appliances, and so were hell-bent to buy Data Domain for large amounts. The final price agreed upon was over two billion US dollars for Data Domain.

For the most part, Data Domain's products are targeted towards small and medium sized businesses, whereas IBM's TS7650 and TS7650G products targets medium and larger sized enterprises.So now that EMC has a viable data deduplication solution, it looks like it will be yet another IBM-vs-EMC debate going forward.

technorati tags: IBM, TS7650G, TS7650, deduplication, ProtecTIER, NetApp, EMC, Data Domain, Audrina Patridge, Teriyaki burger

Last week, I was in Austin, and had dinner at [Rudy's Country Store and BBQ]. They offer their self-proclaimed "Worst BBQ in Austin!" with brisket, sausage and other meats by weight. I got a beer, some potato salad, and creamed corn, all at additional cost, of course. When I went to the cashier to pay, I was offered all the white bread I wanted at no additional charge. Are you kidding me? You are going to charge me for beer, but give me 8 to 12 complimentary slices of white bread (practically half a loaf)? Honestly, I consider bread and beer to be basically the same functional food item, differing only in solid versus liquid form. I chose to have only four slices. The food was awesome!

I am reminded of that from my latest exchange with EMC.It didn't take long after IBM's announcement yesterday of IBM's continued investment in its strategic product set, IBM System Storage DS8000 series, that competitors responded. In particular, fellow blogger BarryB from EMC has a post [DS8000 Finally Gets Thin Provisioning] that pokes fun at the new Thin Provisioning feature.

Interestingly, the attack is not on the technical implementation, which is straightforward and rock-solid, but rather that the feature is charged at a flat rate of $69,000 US dollars (list price) per disk array. BarryB claims that recently EMC Corporate has decided to reduce the price of their own thin provisioning, called Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning (VP) on select subset of models of their storage portfolio, although I have not found an EMC press release to confirm. In other words, EMC will bury the cost of thin provisioning into the total cost for new sales, and stop shafting, er.. over-charging their existing Symmetrix customers that are interesting in licensing this feature.

BarryB claims this was a lucky coincidence that his blog post happened just days before IBM's announcement.

(Update: While the timing appears suspicious, I am not accusing Mr. Burke in anywrongdoing of insider information of IBM's plans, nor am I aware of any investigations on this matter from the SEC or any other government agency, and apologize if my previous attempt at humor suggested otherwise. BarryB claimsthat the reduction in price was motivated to counter publicly announced HDS's "Switch In On" program, that it is not a secret thatEMC reduced VP pricing weeks ago, effective beginning 3Q09, just not widely advertised in any formal EMC press releases.Perhaps this new VP pricing was only disclosed to just EMC's existing Symmetrix customers, Business Partners, and employees. Perhaps EMC's decision not to announce this in a Press Release was to avoid upsetting all the EMC CLARiiON customers that continue to pay for Thin Provisioning, or to avoid a long line of existing VP customers asking for refunds. In any case, people are innocent until proven otherwise, and BarryB rightfully deserves the presumption of innocence in this regard. I'm sorry, BarryB, for any trouble my previous comments may have caused you.)

Let's start with what EMC previously charged for this feature. Software features like this often follow a common pricing method, based per TB, so larger configurations pay more, but tiered in a manner that larger configurations pay less per TB, combined with a yearly maintenance cost.

(Updated: EMC has asked me nicely not to post their actual list prices,so I will provide rough estimates instead. According to BarryB, these are no longer the current prices, soI present them as historical figures for comparison purposes only.)

Holy cow! How did EMC get away charging so much for this? To be fair, these are often deeply discounted, a practice common among the industry. However, it was easy for IBMers to show EMC customers that putting SVC or N series gateways in front of their existing EMC disks was more cost effective. Both SVC and N series, as well as IBM's XIV, provide thin provisioning at no additional charge.

HDS offers their own thin provisioning called Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning.Hitachi also offers an SVC-like capability to virtualize storage behind the USP-V. However, I suspect thatfewer than 10 percent of their install base actually licensed this capability because it cost so much. Under the cost pressure from IBM's thin provisioning capabilities in SVC, XIV and N series, Hitachi launched its ["Switch It On"] marketing campaign to activate virtualization and provide some features at no additional charge, including the first 10TB of Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning.

Last week, Martin Glassborow on his StorageBod blog, argued that EMC and HDS should[Set the Wide Stripes Free]. Here is an excerpt:

HDS and EMC are both extremely guilty in this regard, both Virtual Provisioning and Dynamic Provisioning cost me extra as an end-user to license. But this is the technology upon which all future block-based storage arrays will be built. If you guys want to improve the TCO and show that you are serious about reducing the complexity to manage your arrays, you will license for free. You will encourage the end-user to break free from the shackles of complexity and you will improve the image of Tier-1 storage in the enterprise.

Martin is using the term "free" in two contexts above. In the Linux community, we are careful to clarify "free, as in free speech" or "free, as in free beer". Technically, EMC's virtual provisioning is neither, as one has to purchase the hardware to get the feature, so the term "at no additional charge" is more legally correct.

However, the discussion of "free beer" brings me back to my first paragraph about Rudy's BBQ. Nearly everyone eats bread, with the exception of those with [Celiac Disease] that causesan intolerance for gluten protein in wheat, so burying the cost of white bread in the base cost of the BBQ meat is reasonable. In contrast, not everyone drinks beer, and there are probably several people whowould complain if the cost of beer was included in the cost of the BBQ meat, so charging separately forbeer makes business sense.

The same applies in the storage industry. When all (or most) customers of a product can benefit from a feature, it makes sense to include it at no additional charge. When a significant subset might not want to pay a higher base price because they won't use or benefit from a feature, it makes sense to make it optionally priced.

• For the IBM SVC, XIV and N series, all customers can benefit from thin provisioning, so it is included at no additional charge.

• For the IBM System Storage DS8000, perhaps some 30 to 40 percent of our clients have only System z and/or System i servers attached, and therefore would not benefit from this new thin provisioning. It may seem unfair to raise the price on everybody. The $69,000 flat rate was competitively priced against the prices EMC, HDS and 3PAR were charging for similar capability, and lower than the cost to add a new SVC cluster in front of the DS8000. IBM also charges an annual maintenance, but far lower than what others charged as well.

  (Note: These list prices are approximate, and vary slightly based on whether you are on legacy, ESA, Servicesuite or ServiceElect software and subscription (S&S) service plans, and the machine type/model. The tables were too complicated to include here in this post, so these numbers are rounded for comparison purposes only.)

  TBs Licensed	150	100	25
  IBM flat rate	$69,000	$69,000	$69,000
  Software Maintenance per year (approx)	$2,000	$2,000	$2,000
  Number of years	4 years	4 years	4 years
  Total Maintenance	$8,000	$8,000	$8,000
  Software License Cost (4 years)	$77,000	$77,000	$77,000

Pricing is more art than science. Getting the right pricing structure that appears fair to everyone involved can be a complicated process.

technorati tags: IBM, Austin, BBQ, thin provisioning, EMC, Virtual Provisioning, SEC, SVC, XIV, N series, Martin Glassborow, HDS, Hitachi, Dynamic Provisioning, System z, System i, DS8000