XIV: “They call me Flash, ’cause I can run fast, really fast.”

IBM XIV 11.1 has just announced support for SSD Flash Cache. The title of this post is taken from DC Comics Flash Annual Vol 2 #3 and it’s all about running fast. Not everyone is going to need the XIV Flash Cache performance kicker, but if you want a couple of hundred TiB of massively fast storage [...]

Hu’s on first, Tony’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third

This post started life earlier this year as a post on the death of RAID-5 being signaled by the arrival of 3TB drives. The point being that you can’t afford to be exposed to a second drive failure for 2 or 3 whole days especially given the stress those drives are under during that rebuild [...]

XIV Gen3 Sequential Performance

Big Data can take a variety of forms but what better way to get a feeling for the performance of a big data storage system than using a standard audited benchmark to measure large file processing, large query processing, and video streaming. From the www.storageperformance.org website: “SPC-2 consists of three distinct workloads designed to demonstrate [...]

A Small Challenge with NAS Gateways

SAN Volume Controller Late in 2010, Netapp quietly announced they were not planning to support V Series (and by extension IBM N Series NAS Gateways) to be used with any recent version of IBM’s SAN Volume Controller. This was discussed more fully on the Netapp communities forum (you’ll need to create a login) and the reason given [...]

XIV Gen3 at full speed

Don’t try this at home on your production systems… but it’s nice to see the XIV flying at 455 thousand IOPS. It actually peaked above 460K on this lab test but what’s 5,000 IOPS here or there… Thanks to Mert Baki  

XIV Gen3 & MS Exchange 2010 ESRP

So here’s a quick comparison of XIV Gen3 and Gen2 with some competitors. Note that ESRP is designed to be more of a proof of concept than a benchmark, but it has a performance component which is relevant. Exchange 2010 has reduced disk I/O over Exchange 2007 which has allowed vendors to switch to using [...]

XIV Gen3: Both Hands Clapping

xiv Pronunciation:/zɪv/ noun the sound storage makes as it zooms past its competitors:                  there was a loud xiv as the new IBM system arrived and the other vendors’ disk systems all collapsed under the weight of their own complexity XIV Generation 3 is here and XIV Generation [...]

Nearline-SAS: Who Dares Wins

Maybe you think NL-SAS is old news and it’s already swept SATA aside? Well if you check out the specs on FAS, Isilon, 3PAR, or VMAX, or even the monolithic VSP, you will see that they all list SATA drives, not NL-SAS on their spec sheets. Of the serious contenders, it seems that only VNX, [...]

To Infiniband… and Beyond!

Not here this time… over there >>> This week I’m doing a guest blogging spot over at Barry Whyte’s storage virtualizatiom blog, so if you want to read this week’s post head over to:  https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/storagevirtualization/entry/infinity_and_beyond?lang=en p.s. Infiniband is the new interconnect being used in XIV Gen3    

Storwize V7000 four-fold Scalability takes on VMAX & 3PAR

IBM recently announced that two Storwize V7000 systems could be clustered, in pretty much exactly the same way that two iogroups can be clustered in a SAN Volume Controller environment. Clustering two Storwize V7000s creates a system with up to 480 drives and any of the paired controllers can access any of the storage pools. [...]

Am I boring you? Full stripe writes and other complexity…

In 1978 IBM employee Norman Ken Ouchi was awarded patent 4092732 for a “System for recovering data stored in failed memory unit.” Technology that would later be known as RAID 5 with full stripe writes. Hands up who’s still doing that or its RAID6 derivative 33 years later? I have a particular distaste for technologies [...]

You can’t always get what you want

There have been a raft of new storage efficiency elements brought to market in the last few years, but what has become obvious is that you can’t yet get it all in one product.

Maximum Fibre Channel Distances

Just a quick hit and run blog post for today… This table authored by Karl Hohenauer just came into my inbox. With the changes in cable quality (OM3, OM4) the supported fibre channel distances have confused a few people, so this will be a good reference doc to remember.

Favourite Product of 2010 that Never Was…

With everyone announcing best-of type choices for 2010 I thought I’d take a slightly less serious approach and announce my favourite product of 2010 that never was – a product so cool that either no-one but me thought of it, or more likely, it somehow doesn’t stack up technically or cost-wise.

Exploiting the Intelligence of Inventors

In Tracey Kidder’s book “Soul of a New Machine” I recall Data General’s Tom West as saying that the design that the team at Data General came up with for the MV/8000 minicomputer was so complex that he was worried. He had a friend who had just purchased a first run Digital Equipment Corp VAX, [...]

IBM’s New Midrange with Easy Tier & External Virtualization

Yes, IBM has announced a new midrange virtualized disk system, the Storwize V7000. A veritable CLARiiON-killer : )

Does my midrange look big in this?

IDC defines three categories of external disk. The midrange market leaders are EMC, Netapp and IBM (followed by Dell and HP with both slipping slightly over the last 12 months). Netapp is almost entirely a midrange business, while EMC and IBM are the market leaders in highend. Over the last 4 quarters midrange has accounted [...]

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

There are four reasons I can think of why a company wants to buy another: To take a position in a market you didn’t expect to be in but has suddenly become important to you (e.g. EMC buying VMware) To take a position in a market you did expect to be in, but the internal [...]

Choice or Clutter?

Vendors often struggle to be strong in all market segments and address the broad range of customer requirements with a limited range of products. Products that fit well into one segment don’t always translate well to others, especially when trying to bridge both midrange and enterprise requirements.

When Space, Time & Vendor Charges Collide…

Well the whole snapshot and replication thing got me thinking about vendor licensing. Licensing is a way to get a return on one’s R&D, it doesn’t really matter whether customers pay x for hardware and y for software, or x+y for the hardware ‘solution’ and zero for software functions etc, as long as the vendor [...]

Bow ties are cool – When time and space collide

Every storage vendor has sales slides that tell us that data growth rates are accelerating and the world will explode soon unless you buy their product to manage that… …and yet the average IT shop is still mostly doing backups the old fashioned way, with weekly fulls and daily incrementals, and scratching their heads about [...]

Is it time for the Enterprise Linux Server?

IBM’s Z10 Enterprise Linux Server is an interesting alternative to a large-scale VMware deployment. Essentially, any Linux workload that is a good fit for being virtualised with Vmware is a good fit for being virtualised on Z10.

Hey this Gibibyte stuff is really taking off!

So you know we’re making progress on the binary units thing (see my post entitled “How many fingers am I holding up“) when Piratebay.org starts using GiB… 7,368,671,232  Bytes   =    7.37 GB     or    6.86 GiB Now if we can only get the IT vendor community to consistently follow Piratebay’s excellent [...]

XIV Async (Snapshot) Replication

Snapshot-based Replication/Mirroring: I thought it might be worth taking a quick look at async (snapshot) replication/mirroring which was released for XIV earlier this year with 10.2.0.a of the firmware. XIV async is similar in concept to Netapp’s async SnapMirror, both are snapshot based and both consume snapshot space as a part of the mirroring process. One [...]

How many fingers am I holding up?

The base2 Vs base10 nett capacity question is an interesting one. It remains a place of confusion for customers and that’s not surprising as it remains a place of confusion for vendors also.

What Happens When a Controller Fails

Whether XIV is a visionary way to reduce your storage TCO, or just a bizarre piece of foolishness as some bloggers would have you believe, is being tested daily, and every day that passes with large customers enjoying the freedom of XIV ease of use, performance and reliability, is another vote for it being a [...]

Layered Storage Monitoring Tools

If you’re a big XIV fan, one of the things you might love about it is the built-in (i.e. ‘free’) monitoring tools that are really easy to use. Also the xivtop utility which will be immediately familiar to anyone who has used ‘top’ on linux or UNIX systems. But for many others in the non-XIV [...]

Application-aware snapshots for IBM Storage

Something strange has happened. IBM’s Tivoli group has produced some low-priced high-value storage software that’s easy to understand and easy to use! FlashCopy Manager provides fast application-aware backups and restores, leveraging the snapshot features of IBM storage systems.

Some quotes from the web about XIV

There are of course the official IBM references but these below are are a few unofficial public comments from customers and analysts that I found after a quick sweep of the web. I was looking for something else and started stumbling across these, so I thought I would post them.

XIV & MS Exch 2007 Replicated Performance

Vendors typically only benchmark their fastest systems in any one class, which means that a bit of careful reflection is required to get a good understanding of things from a few results. The usual “nyah nyah ours is faster” kind of analysis and comment that seems to permeate the blogosphere doesn’t really achieve anything that’s [...]

Survival in the Blogosphere

Hey here we are a few days in and so far I hope I haven’t rubbished anyone else’s product. I’m even trying to be more respectful of XIV’s denigrators : ) That second post was a marathon of detailed research I can tell you. The third had a lot more research in it than it [...]

Comparing XIV Power Consumption

XIV relies on lots of Intel cores and distributed caches to deliver performance. People who get hung up on disk systems being all about disk drives have trouble understanding XIV in so many ways, including power consumption.

XIV Drive Management

One issue that urgently needs accuracy and clarity is the disk management technology behind XIV.