Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Continuing coverage of the [Systems Technical University 2014] conference, we had our last set of breakout sessions on day 4.

New Generation Storage Tiering: Less Management, Lower Investment and Increased Performance

This was not just an update to my session last year in Brussels, Belgium. Rather, I decided to start over and focus I/O density as the metric to focus my efforts, armed with real data from Intelligent Storage Tiering Analysis (ISTA) studies done at various clients. From that, I was able to talk about storage tiering on three fronts:

• Storage tiering between Flash and disk. IBM FlashSystem and IBM Easy Tier on DS8000 and Storwize family for hybrid Flash-and-disk configurations.
  
  
• Storage tiering between disk and tape. HSM and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) on SONAS, Storwize V7000 Unified and LTFS-EE.
  
  
• Storage tiering automation across your entire environment. ISTA studies can help identify a target mix of Tier 0, Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage. SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center can recommend or perform the movement of LUNs to more appropriate tiers, based on age and I/O density measurements.

Next Generation FlashSystem 840 and V840, Architecture Deep Dive

Detlef Helmbrecht, from the IBM Advanced Technical Skills team in Germany, presented this deep dive in our latest IBM FlashSystem offerings. He started with an analogy. Latency is like a single car driving down an empty highway. IOPS, on the other hand, is like a lot of cars stuck in slow traffic, with all lanes filled on the autobahn. While there are more cars transported on a full highway, the individual cars are not driving very fast. Flash versus disk has similar comparisons.

Detlef explained the differences between the previous FlashSystem 810/820 with the new 840, as well as talk about the FlashAdapter 90 now available as a PCIe card.

Finally, we talked about SAN Volume Controller combined with Flash, and the new FlashSystem V840 which combines SVC and FlashSystem 840 to have an incredibly function-rich, robust solution.

Data Footprint Reduction - Understanding IBM Storage Efficiency Options

My last session of the week! This session covered all of the various technologies for data footprint reduction, including Thin Provisioning, Space-efficient FlashCopy and snapshots, Real-time compression and data deduplication. Frankly, I wasn't expecting many people to attend the last session of the last day, but nearly 50% of the seats were filled, so I was quite pleased on the turn-out.

Fun Fact: Istanbul is considered by TripAdvisor in 2014 as the #1 most popular city to visit in Europe!

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmtechu, STU, Istanbul, TripAdvisor, storage tiering, FlashSystem, HSM, ILM, SONAS, Storwize, ISTA, SmartCloud, Virtual Storage Center, data footprint reduction, FlashCopy, Thin Provisioning, Real-time Compression, Data Deduplication, Detlef Helmbrecht