Last week I had a couple of meetings in Manchester (UK) with some SVC and V7000 end users, as well as the chance to pop in and say hi to our team in the IBM Manchester labs. About two days before heading up the M6 I was asked if I'd like to join in a roundtable session with UKFast - discussing the...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  svc performance v7000 ssd virtualization

Configuring IBM Storwize V7000 and SVC for Optimal Performance Part 2 Thanks to everyone who responded to my Part 1 post, I'm amazed at how many people must read what I have to say! Based on the number of you that have either spoken to me in person, or emailed. I'm glad to be of some use ...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  storage performance storwize ssd hdd svc v7000

As you may or may not have seen, IBM has agreed to acquire Texas Memory Systems : http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/38594.wss   This has many implications (all good) for SVC, Storwize V7000, and Pure Systems. Better integration with existing RamSan products, and of course integrated...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  ramsan performance tms ssd v7000 svc

One of the key benefits of the Storwize V7000 product is its built in Virtiualization capabilites. Or as some vendors like to call it  Federation? Its been almost 9 years since we first released SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and in that time, its been through 6 hardware iterations, and 16 major...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  performance v7000 ssd storage benchmark svc

Configuring IBM Storwize V7000 and SVC  for Optimal Performance Part 1 I've been involved in a quite a few pre-sales, proof of concept and after-sales accounts where people have setup their V7000 and then wondered about the performance they are achieving, is it optimal, can they do...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  optimization svc performance v7000

Well, i guess I should first wish, any readers I still have left a Happy New Year. Not only are we now into 2012, but hey its February too, where did January go... must be some kind of temporal locality thing going on (private joke - sorry, all will become clear all too soon) For those of you...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  virtualization v7000 spc scp1 storwize svc performance

 Yes, I am still in the land of the living. I promise (to myself as much as anything) that I will blog a whole bunch in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, coming to an SVC, or V7000 GUi near you...

Tags:  v7000 storwize storage virtualization performance svc

At the risk of re-gurgitating recent Storage benchmarketing scars and rumblings, its probably escaped most people that we just published another Storwize V7000 SPC-1 benchmark. Why another I hear you ask, well the first one we published was back in November when the product first GA'd. However, we...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  performance spc storage virtualization svc v7000

 It was nice to have a day back in the office today, the last couple of weeks have gone by in somewhat of a blurr, with several offsite customer visits, several more visiting Hursley, my vLab sesson at IP expo in London , then last week in Germany at the SVC User Group in Mainz and finally all...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  storage benchmarking spc storwize performance v7000 svc

 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]


Tags:  svc performance storage virtualization

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....   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  performance svc ibm storage virtualization

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 storage spc virtualization svc

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...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  spc emc performance storage ibm svc

 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 we approach SVC's 6th birthday its interesting to see the rest of the industry starting to catch up and realise not only that a modular commodity storage controller is the way forward, but that also clustering of said modular controllers has many benefits. We all await todays announcement of HDS...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  hdd in-band symmetrix usp-v hds emc ssd storage ibm usp svc hp dmx disk performance invista

I'd mentioned we (the SVC performance team) have a few bits of fine tuning and investigations to perform for the next (4.3.0) release of SVC. This is the part of my job that I enjoy the most, getting the latest builds from development and putting them through their paces, drilling into the running...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  xiv performance sspc data+center svc

Just a quick post to let those interested know that the [SVC Best Practices and Performance Guidelines] Redbook has just been made publicly available on the IBM Redbooks website . Many thanks to Jon Tate and his team of able (and pestering) technical writers for all their hard work. Jon and I spent...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  redbook performance svc

Last week was a long one. The main SVC test-lab in Hursley suffers from the same problems that haunts most machine rooms - lack of power and not enough cooling. Thats not to say that we don't have a lot of both, just that as the support and test requirements have increased over the last five years,...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  cache performance svc virtualization storage

This morning one of my colleagues in my office bay started a discussion about the fine line between divulging useful technical information on this blog-o-sphere while maintaining the confidentiality of technical information, product plans and general intellectual property of IBM. I explained to him...   [Continue Reading]


Tags:  svc performance storage virtualization disk