Today's announcements are all about the Storwize family, IBM's market-leading Software Defined Storage offerings. Having sold over 55,000 systems, and managing over 1.6 Exabytes of data, IBM continues to be the #1 leader in storage virtualization solutions. The Storwize family consists of the SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Storwize V7000, Storwize V7000 Unified, Flex System V7000, Storwize V5000, Storwize V3700 and V3500.
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SAN Volume Controller 2145-DH8
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The new 2145-DH8 model is a complete repackaging of this popular storage system. The previous model, the 2145-CG8, was 1U-high x86 server per node, and each node required a separate 1U-high UPS to provide battery protection for its cache. Nobody liked this. The new 2145-DH8 instead is a 2U-high node with two hot-swappable batteries, eliminating the need for UPS altogether. Thus, an SVC node-pair using the 2145-DH8 models takes up the same 4U space, but with fewer cables. The SVC can now also support standard office 110/240 voltage sources.
The new model sports an 8-core processor with 32GB RAM. Since these are 2-socket servers, IBM offers that option to add a second 8-core processor and additional 32GB RAM to help boost Real-time Compression. Each node can have optionally one or two hardware-assisted compression cards which use the Intel QuickAssist chip to boost compression performance.
While the Real-time Compression was in fact, real-time, performed in-line to the read/write I/O process, at latency comparable to uncompressed data for applications, the compression process on older models was entirely software-based, consuming some of the CPU resources, which lowered the maximum IOPS of the solution. With the added cores, added RAM, and hardware-assisted compression chips, IBM resolves that concern. In fact, the new 2145-DH8 with compression can provide more IOPS than an older 2145-CG8 without compression.
The previous model 2145-CG8 allowed you to put up to 4 small SSD drives in the node itself, which were treated the same as externally Flash drives for purposes of having a high-speed storage pool for select volumes, or automated sub-LUN tiering with Easy Tier. The new model 2145-DH8 allows you to attach up to 48 Solid State Drives (SSD) via 12Gb SAS cables. These are housed in the new 2U-high 24F enclosures that can offer up to 38.4 TB of Flash per SVC I/O group.
IBM also re-designed the host/device ports to use Hardware Interface Card (HIC) slots. In the 2145-CG8, you had four FCP ports, two 1GbE Ethernet ports, with options to add two 10GbE Ethernet ports or four additional FCP ports. If you had mostly an FCoE or iSCSI environment, you didn't need the FCP, and if you were mostly a FCP Storage Area Network (SAN) environment, then most of the Ethernet ports went unused. To solve this, the 2145-DH8 can allow you to have up to six HIC cards that are either FCP, Ethernet, or SAS. There are three 1GbE fixed Ethernet ports which can be used for iSCSI and administration.
If you have SVC today, you can upgrade non-disruptively by either swapping out your current SVC engines with the new 2145-DH8 engines, or you can add the new 2145-DH8 engines to your existing SVC cluster. Either way, there is no outage to your applications!
To learn more, see the [Announcement letter: SAN Volume Controller Storage Engine DH8].
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New Storwize V7000 hardware
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This is the next generation of the popular Storwize V7000. The previous generation had a 4-core processor and 8GB RAM per canister. The new model has an 8-core processor with 32GB of RAM per canister, with the option to double these to boost Real-time compression. There are two canisters per control enclosure, which gives you 64GB to 128GB of RAM per Storwize V7000 I/O group.
The new Storwize V7000 comes with one hardware-assisted compression chip on the mother board of each canister, with the option to add a second chip per canister.
Each canister offers three HIC slots, which can be used for the additional hardware-assist compression chip, FCP or Ethernet ports.
To accommodate these HIC slots, new canisters were needed. Instead of the flat wide style top and bottom, we now have taller, thinner canisters that sit side to side. This side-to-side design is similar to our existing Storwize V5000 and V3700 models.
The previous model could support up to 9 expansion enclosures per control enclosure. The Storwize V7000 can have up to 24 drives in its control enclosure, and now attach up to 20 expansion enclosures, which allows up to 504 drives per control enclosure, and up to a maximum of 1,056 drives per Storwize cluster.
If you have previous models of Storwize V7000, you can add the new Storwize V7000 into the same cluster, or virtualize the previous storage for migration purposes.
To learn more, see the [Announcement letter: New Storwize V7000].
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IBM Storwize Family Software V7.3.0
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The new software applies new capabilities to both new generation hardware as well as the older models, so people with existing gear can benefit as well.
In prior releases, the sub-LUN automated tiering was limited to two levels: Flash and HDD. This lumped all 15K, 10K and 7200 RPM drives into a common HDD category. In the new v7.3.0 code, you can now have three levels: Flash, Enterprise HDD, and Nearline HDD, or two HDD levels: Enterprise and Nearline. The Enterprise level combines 15K and 10K RPM drives, similar to what is done on the IBM System Storage DS8000 disk systems.
The new code is also able balance your storage pools, and can be used with uniform or mixed storage pools to eliminate performance hot spots.
The new code has been enhanced to detect the hardware-assisted compression chip on the new SVC and Storwize V7000 models, and use those if available.
For the Storwize V3700 and V5000 models, the new code allows up to nine expansion enclosures per control enclosure. In the previous models, the V3700 allowed only four expansions, and the V6000 only six expansions per control enclosure. The V3700 can now support up to 240 drives, and the V5000 can support up to 480 drives.
To learn more, see the [Announcement letter: Storwize Family Software v7.3.0].
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IBM Storwize V7000 Unified File Module software v1.5
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For Storwize V7000 Unified clients, there is new software for the File Modules that provide NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTPS and SCP protocol capability. The new v1.5 code now adds NFS v4 and SMB 2.1 levels of support. Most NFS users are still on NFSv3, but about 20 percent of NFS users are using NFS v4 which offers stateful access. The SMB 2.1 for CIFS was introduced by Microsoft in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Deterministic ID mapping allows you to map Windows userids to UNIX/Linux group and owner id numbers. In the past, the problem is that this mapping is different on each machine, so people often had to stand up a Windows System for Unix Services (SFU) server to provide consistent ID mapping. Now, with v1.5 code, you will no longer have to do this. The deterministic ID mapping will can now replicate the mapping to each machine without an SFU server.
Active Cloud Engine allows up to ten Storwize V7000 Unified to be connected across distance to form a single global name space. WAN caching, however, was restricted to a single site having write capabilities, while the others were read-only. In v1.5 release, IBM now supports multiple independent writers at different locations on the same fileset.
Security enhancements include multi-tenancy, configurable password policies, session policies, and hardened boot and SSH configurations. With NFS v3/v4, you can now use [Kerberos] for security.
Finally, I am please to see that we now have Cinder support for files on the Storwize V7000 Unified on the OpenStack Havana release that just came out last month. The OpenStack Cinder interface can assign LUNs to virtual machines, but the new Havana release allows NAS systems to dole out files that act as LUNs, such as OVA or VMDK files. The advantage is that these files can managed by Active Cloud Engine, cached locally across global name space, have policies place them on appropriate storage tiers, and inactive Virtual Machine images can be migrated to less expensive disk or tape.
To learn more, see the [Announcement letter: Storwize Family Software v7.3.0].