Over at Burke HQ , I see that he's a little put out by a few questioning articles after EMCs 1Q broadcasts. In his latest post titled "Lions and Tigers and Bears" I can only but say "oh my!" Its unlike BarryB to tee himself up for such an obvious retort and to use his words not mine, let me explain....   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  svc virtualization space+efficient sata solid+state dmx

Its been so difficult to keep all this to myself over the last few months, especially last month when we actually reached our goal. 1 Million real life IOPs at less than 1ms - no caching, just pure raw performance. You may, or may not have seen the IBM press release , covering the first part of...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  virtualization svc ibm ssd

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 svc cloud ssd ibm dmx

 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:  svc tiering performance virtualization cf8 ibm stroage snow

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

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

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

 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

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

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

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

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]


Tags:  storage virtualization svc

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]


Tags:  svc invista storage virtualization emc

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]


Tags:  storage virtualization ds8000 svc easy-tier ds8700