Storwize V7000 Unified, A marriage of SAN and NAS

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The bride comes from the NAS family who were in attendance.  She also has ties with the Tivoli and GPFS families deep within the storage community.  There were family members from the X series family who were at the ceremony.

The groom comes from a long line of storage products.  XiV, DS8800 and SVC were all part of the festivities and supported the groom throughout entire day. 


After long anticipation, IBM is now in the unified storage market with the introduction of the Storwize V7000 Unified (SV7kU?).  The system stands as small as 6U of rack space and can flex up to four clustered systems (via RPQ) supporting internal SAS, SATA or virtualized external disk from other vendors. 

The V7000 Unified is a midrange disk system that will allow new V7000 or existing V7000 customers the ability to integrate their NAS workload into the system. Using the standard V7000 shelf, IBM has added two 3650m3 servers with the IBM NAS software stack to complete a unified architecture.

 A new GUI that ingrates the NAS portion of the software is now available that will combine management for both technologies with a few mouse clicks.  Setup of the system stays the same with the simplified USB key approach.  Customers have reported that between the USB key installation and the wizard driven alerts, the V7000 has been one of the easiest systems to install and configure.  IBM decided to keep these features in the enhanced GUI.
 Here are some screenshots that show the new integration of the NAS software stack

 


V7000 Unified will support NFS/CIFS/FTP/HTTPs/SCP protocols in addition to block functions FCP and iSCSI.  It will also support file replication and file level snapshots for business continuity in addition to existing block functions. 

Another function in the V7000 Unified that will help customers is the introduction of the IBM Active Cloud Engine.  What is it?  Think of it as a very smart, very fast robot – that never sleeps – keeping your cloud storage neat, tidy and running smoothly.  Think Rosie the robot from The Jetsons.

This engine is a policy driven engine that will help improve the storage efficiency by automatically placing, moving and deleting files to the appropriate storage.  The efficiency gain comes from storing the files where they should be with out an administrator manually moving them.  As data is gets older, the engine can move the file to another location where the price per TB is less and even delete the file if necessary. 

The movement is done seamlessly and the end user does not have any idea their data has moved.  Another aspect of the engine is identifying files for backups or replication to a DR location.  As the data ages, the data continues the life cycle through the data center without storage administrators intervention. 

Data can be moved from internal disk to external virtualized disk and even to tape.  The diagram below shows the movement from file creation to 180 days old and off to deduped tape.

 
 

 

Another question people are asking is about the relationship with Netapp and how will this product effect the N series product line.  IBM is expanding the midrange storage portfolio by offering both the new V7000 Unified along with our N series products to focus on different client needs.

N series continues to be IBM’s offering focused on clients who have a primary need for NAS optimized (file) workloads. Existing N series clients with growing data requirements will continue to require additional N series disk drives, expansion units, and new systems to meet their needs.

IBM Storwize V7000 Unified will particularly appeal to clients who have a primary need for storage to support block optimized workloads with additional needs to consolidate file workloads for greater efficiency (unified storage).  Storwize V7000 Unified is also targeted to clients that can benefit from the unique capabilities of IBM Active Cloud Engine or to clients that already are using Storwize V7000 or SONAS.

Just like in real life, we have seen other marriages come and go but this one seems to be different.  The V7000 Unified is using the best of the storage portfolio and bringing value to the customer.  IBM is also leveraging the investments made over 10 years of innovation; Virtualization, Easy Tier, Simplified GUI, Active Cloud Engine and is producing a product that will accomplish the lowering total cost of ownership. 

As goes with the tradition of the bride to have good-luck:
“Something old, something new, something borrowed,
something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe."
(You can find this poem in Leslie Jones' book "Happy is the Bride the Sun Shines On.").  We find the IBM version of this offering good luck with the following:
Something Old: 4,500 V7000 systems sold last year
Something New: Active Cloud Engine
Something Borrowed: Storage Virtualization
Something Blue: Storwize V7000 Unified, a true IBM organic product

I am still looking for the sixpence but feel free to mail us one and we will attach it to the bezel of each controller.