Originally posted by: TonyPearson
Continuing coverage of the [Systems Technical University 2014] conference, I participated in a "Meet the Experts" session on day 3.
Johann Weiss, Jim Blue and I joined several other local experts to answer questions and respond to comments and suggestions attendees had about IBM System Storage products and solutions. Here is a sample:
I would like to add 1TB of Flash to our FlashSystem 810 and have the system automatically re-stripe across this new capacity non-disruptively?
Good suggestion!
How can I have XIV systems at two datacenters in an active/active configuration that would allow me to vMotion from one location to the other non-disruptively?
Put them behind the SAN Volume Controller in Stretched Cluster mode.
What about a similar active/active but for NAS?
IBM N series.
I would like HyperSwap on the SVC/Storwize family like the DS8000 offers for AIX?
Good suggestion!
When will IBM offer a multi-frame XIV?
The "Hyper-Scale" set of features lets you logically connect 144 XIV frames together and treat as a single system. There is no need to physically bolt them together, since the communication is done over standard network switches.
When will IBM devices have native FCoE support?
All IBM System Storage products work within an FCoE framework today, either with native FCoE support, or through Top-of-Rack switches splitting out the traffic between IP and FCP traditional networks. IBM Storwize and N series products support FCoE natively, and any disk behind virtualized by SAN Volume Controller or Storwize can be access via FCoE hosts because of this support.
What is FLAPE?
FLAPE is the combination of Flash and Tape. Both of these technologies are improving over 40 percent year-to-year, but disk is slowing down to 20 percent improvement. It is possible to combine Flash and tape systems, such as IBM LTFS-EE or IBM ProtecTIER TS7600 series.
Only the Storwize V7000 Unified supports file modules to add NAS capabilities, what can IBM offer us that is smaller for NAS deployments, perhaps a Storwize V5000 Unified or Storwize V3700 Unified?
Consider the IBM N3000 series.
Other storage vendors indicate that RAID-5 and RAID-6 are running out of steam, are no longer practical to protect ever growing capacities of disk. What is IBM planning in this area?
IBM XIV Storage System was one of the first to offer a distributed RAID that addresses many of the RAID-5/RAID-6 drive rebuild concerns. IBM DCS3700 and DCS3860 also have Dynamic Disk Pooling to reduce drive rebuild impact. Lastly, IBM GPFS now offers Native RAID support, used in the IBM GPFS Storage Server.
Is it true that GPFS is NFS only?
Do not confuse GPFS the file system with the various storage offerings that are based on GPFS. IBM SONAS and Storwize V7000 Unified, both based on GPFS, support CIFS, NFS, HTTPS, SCP and FTP. IBM GPFS Storage Server can be configured to access GPFS natively, or you can run NFS v3/v4 server to make those protocols available. With Microsoft [
Windows Storage Server], you can provide CIFS access to any GPFS-based storage solution.
LTFS-EE sounds like an exciting alternative to IBM Tivoli Storage Manager HSM space management for moving data from disk to tape. Do you agree?
Yes, we agree. However, TSM HSM space management supports a broader set of file systems. LTFS-EE only provides disk-to-tape movement for IBM GPFS.
Why does the DS8000 implementation of Easy Tier sub-LUN automated tiering support three tiers, but SVC/Storwize only support two tiers?
The same software engineering team works on both, but develop new features for the DS8000 first, get it working, then port it over to the Storwize family. At times, there might be gaps between what is supported on the latest DS8000 version and what is available on Storwize family products.
In an SVC Stretched Cluster, I would like to have the third quorum disk connected over the IP network, rather than FCP.
Good suggestion!
Personally, I enjoy these interchanges. They are sometimes called "Birds-of-a-Feather" or BOF at some conferences, "Free-for-All" at others. At IBM conferences, they are often titled "Meet the Experts". Whatever you call it, the questions and feedback on what clients are thinking are quite useful for product planning and prioritization of future planned features.
technorati tags: IBM, FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, Stretched Cluster, Storwize, Multi-frame XIV, HyperSwap, Hyper-Scale, N3000, DS8000, RAID-5, RAID-6, Distributed RAID, Dynamic Disk Pooling, RAID rebuild, GPFS, GPFS Native RAID, GNR, SONAS, Storwize V7000 Unified, TSM, LTFS, LTFS-EE, BOF, Free-for-All, Meet the Experts