Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements!

New Nearline expansion enclosures for FlashSystem V9000 and SAN Volume Controller (SVC)

The new 12 Gb SAS expansion enclosure expands total capacity and delivers a tiered data solution. Each LFF expansion enclosure supports twelve 3.5-inch 8 TB NL-SAS drives. Up to two expansion enclosures are supported by a FlashSystem V9000 or SVC controller pair, delivering up to twenty-four drives and 192 TB of raw capacity. The capacity can be compressed up to 5x (80 percent savings) using IBM Real-time Compression.

To learn more, see [New IBM FlashSystem expansion enclosure] press release.

IBM Spectrum Control and IBM Virtual Storage Center V5.2.10 release

IBM Spectrum Control continues its quarterly continous delivery model with version 5.2.10 release. This is also included in all variants of IBM Virtual Storage Center which bundles IBM Spectrum Control with IBM Spectrum Virtualize products. New features include:

• View more details about capacity growth over time for storage systems, pools, volumes, fileset, and file systems. This helps capacity planners to plan for future purchases and procurement.
   
• Aggregate basic information across multiple Spectrum Control servers into a single place, rolling up information was temporally removed in Spectrum Control V5.2.8 and is now available in the web-based GUI for the first time. This is intended for clients to manage multiple data center sites, but can also be used to Cloud Service Providers and Managed Service Providers to generate reporting across a group of clients.
   
• Compare the workload and performance characteristics of IBM SAN Volume Control and IBM Storwize systems against best practice performance guidelines. This is especially useful synergy for the IBM Virtual Storage Center bundles.
   
• Export performance data for storage systems and fabrics using a new Create Performance Support Package wizard. This is helpful in case you observe a performance problem with your IBM storage system, and the IBM support for that device would like to receive the measured performance statistics for further analysis. In the same manner that IBM Spectrum Control drastically reduces troubleshooting time for clients, it is also proven useful for IBM support teams.
   
• Understand how the capacity of storage systems is used when storage virtualization is implemented in the environment, by looking at the information about virtualized and non-virtualized capacity. This allows storage administrators to show upper management how their investment in IBM Spectrum Virtualize (SVC, Storwize, etc.) has returned on investment.
   
• Launch the IBM Spectrum Scale GUI from IBM Spectrum Control to deliver an even better integration of the two products.

To learn more, see [IBM Spectrum Control V5.2.10 and IBM Virtual Storage Center V5.2.10 deliver enhancements] press release.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software V7.7 release

It is hard to believe I was the "Technical Evangelist" for SAN Volume Controller when it launched in 2003. That was 13 years ago! Since then, a variety of products using the shared codes base (IBM Spectrum Virtualize) have launched, including IBM Storwize family and IBM FlashSystem V9000 mentioned above. The new IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software V7.7 delivers the following improvements:

• Reliability, availability, and serviceablility with NPIV host port fabric virtualization. This is actually pretty cool feature. NPIV stands for "N-port ID Virtualization". Every Spectrum Virtualize port has an N-port ID, and if one node fails, multi-pathing software must scramble to look up its partner node and re-direct traffic to the ports of that other node. With NPIV, the partner node takes on the N-ports of both its own node, as well as the failed node, and handles all the traffic, and then gives back the N-ports back to the other node when it is back up and running.
   
• Distributed RAID (DRAID) support for encryption. IBM added support for distributed RAID-5 and RAID-6 in the previous release, but at the time did not include the built-in encryption feature for these new kind of RAID ranks. Now it supports encryption.
   
• Graphical User Interface (GUI) enhancements to manage your IP-based quorums. Previously, if you had a two-site configuration like Stretched Cluster or HyperSwap, best practices would require a third location as "tie breaker". Thus, people ran fiber optic cables from both sites to a third location, with a small disk system in a closet somewhere. The IP-based quorum is a little Java program you can run on any system, and so long as both sites have LAN or WAN access, serves the same role.
   
• Graphical User Interface (GUI) enhancements to run the "Compresitmator" tool. The Comprestimator tool can run against existing volumes (vDisks) to identify estimated compression savings.
   
• Flexibility Virtualization of iSCSI-attached and Fibre Channel-attached external Storage arrays. Previously, only Fibre Channel (FCP and FCoE) back-end devices could be virtualized. Initially, this will support iSCSI virtualization of IBM Storwize and Dell EqualLogic.
   
• Performance with 64 GB read cache. The software code was enhanced to take advantage of 64-bit memory addressing to support larger read cache.
   
• Licensing of compression formally added to the External Virtualization software package of Storwize V5030. (See my February 2016 blog post [IBM announces next generation Storwize V5000 models]
   
• Software licensing metrics to better align the value of SVC software with Storage use cases through Differential Licensing, based on Storage Capacity Unit (SCU). The licensing for SVC has base and compression license based on the back-end (managed physical usable capacity), and then various features that are based on the subset of front-end capacity (virtual volumes). The new Differential Licensing applies SCU to the back-end (base license and compression). The front-end features continue to be TB-based.
   
• IP Link compression to improve usage of IP networks for remote-copy data transmission

To learn more, see [IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software V7.7 delivers new software features] press release.

Differential Licensing based on Storage Capacity Unit (SCU)

 

Differential licensing based on new concept IBM calls Storage Capacity Unit (SCU). Previously, software was licensed per Terabyte (TB), but that treated all TB the same, from Flash to Nearline disks. The new license method takes storage media into three categeories:

1. 1 SCU equals 1.00 TB of Flash and Solid-State Drives (SSDs), and any other storage not listed in the categories below.
    
2. 1 SCU equals 1.18 TB of 10K and 15K rpm drives, such as Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Drives and Fiber Channel Drives, as well as systems using "Category 3" (Nearline or SATA drives) with advanced architectures to deliver high-end storage performance, such as IBM XIV Storage System, HP 3PAR or Infinidat .
    
3. 1 SCU equals 4.00 TB of 7200 rpm Nearline SAS (NL-SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) Drives

This new licensing is experimental. I would be interested in your feedback.

Please provide your feedback and comments below.

technorati tags: IBM, FlashSystem, FlashSystem V9000, Nearline, Spectrum Control, Spectrum Virtualize, Virtual Storage Center, VSC, SVC, Storwize, Storwize V7000, Storwize V5000, Storwize V5030, iSCSI, Differential licensing, Storage Capacity Unit, SCU, Comprestimator