Originally posted by: TonyPearson

DS8300 Benchmark for Global Mirror

Phil Allison of Fidelity National Information Services presented his success switching from competition over to IBM DS8300 disk systems for use with Global Mirror. They had usedPerformance Associates famous PAIO driver to help to the benchmarktesting. They ran the benchmars at 2x and 3x their current workloads to see how well the DS8000 performed,measuring IOPS, MB/sec, and millisecond response time (msec). They were very impressed with their results,staying below their target 0.8 msec for most of their runs.

For the Global Mirror, the did a performance "bake-off" between Ciena CN2000 versus Cisco 9216i. These areimplemented differently. Ciena uses a Layer-2 approach, encapsulating the Fibre Channel packets directlyto transport as SDH/SONET or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), which required dedicated circuits between JacksonvilleFlorida and Little Rock, Arkansas. By contrast, Cisco uses a Layer-3 approach, encapsulating Fibre Channelpackets within an IP packet, which can leverage existing datacenter-to-datacenter backbone.

To add stress to the benchmarks, they used a "Network Impairment" emulator. These artificially inject errors,lose packets, and other signal loss conditions. Running both Cisco and Ciena under these tests help them decide which to purchase, but also enforced that idea that they made the right choice choosing IBM for theirremote distance mirroring solution.

Comparison of Bare Machine Recovery Techniques

"Bare machine recovery" is the phrase used to restore a machine that has no operating system installed (or thewrong operating system). Dave Canan from IBM Advanced Technical Support did a great job reviewing the variousproducts and techniques available, and the pros and cons of each approach. The ones he covered were:

• Tivoli Storage Manager - install fresh Windows Operating System, TSM client, and then follow certain steps
• Automated System Recovery(ASR) - a new feature of Windows XP and Windows 2003 works with TSM client
• Symantec Ghost - formerly callled PowerQuest Drive Image, there are now two versions: Ghost Home Edition and Ghost Corporate Solution Suite
• Cristie Bare Machine Recovery(CBMR) - This is an IBM partner that provides both Linux and Windows PE versions. Cristie includes a license for Windows PE, so no need to use the alternative Bart PE method.

SAN Volume Controller - Customer Experience

Bill Giles of Catholic Medical Center, a hospital in New Hampshire, presented his experienceswith IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller. They have a mix of IBM System x, System p, andSystem i servers, as well as machines from HP, Sun, and Dell. For applications, they havePicture Archiving and Communicatiion System (PACS) for cardiology and radiology, HL7 Interface engine, Clinical Information System, TSM for backup, and Microsoft Exchange fore-mail.

They deployed SVC on AIX, Solaris, Windows 2000 and 2003. They were very delightedwith the results:

• Centralized Storage Provisioning
• Consolidating disparate storage into a universal platform
• Enables non-disruptive data migration
• Increased utilization of existing disk resources
• Improved disaster recovery with FlashCopy and Metro Mirror

Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions

We had two BOFs, one for storage attached to System z operating systems, and another for storage attached to Linux, UNIX and Windows systems. This distinctionmade sense when mainframes could only attach to CKD disks and ESCON/FICON tape,and distributed systems could only do FCP/SCSI, but these days, there are all kindsof convergence going on.

Linux on System z can now attach via FCP to LTO tape and SAN Volume Controller, allowing now a wide range of storage options for that platform. z/OS, z/VM, z/VSEand Linux on System z can all access IBM System Storage N series via NFS.

The format was traditional Q&A panel, we had experts at the front of the room,handling the questions and discussion topics brought up by the audience. I'll spareyou the individual questions and answers.

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