Mainframe Storage

Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements! I am here in New York for the exciting news!

(FCC Disclosure: I work for IBM. This blog post can be considered a "paid celebrity endorsement" for the IBM z14 mainframe and DS8880 Storage System.)

In support of the [IBM z14] mainframe announcement, IBM has also disclosed R8.3 enhancements for the DS8880 Storage System. Here is a quick recap:

New Tier-1 Flash Capacities available for HPFE Gen2 drawers

IBM introduces the new Tier-1 flash card capacity 3.84 TB flash card. In the past, IBM DS8880 only supported Tier-0 cards that support 10 Drive Writes per Day (10 DWPD), with capacities 400, 800, 1600 and 3200 GB. The Tier-1 flash card only handles 1 DWPD, often dubbed "Read-Intensive" devices, but can actually handle about 90 percent of most production workloads.

zHyperLink™

zHyperLink™ drastically reduces the latency between the IBM z14 mainframe and the DS8880 storage systems. Traditional FICON paths through SAN switches or directors introduced about 140 to 175 microseconds of latency between systems. This new system is a direct cable, with 20 microsecond latency.

The I/O bays on the DS8880 used for HPFE Gen2 already have zHyperLink ports on them. This direct cable is limited to 150 meters, however, so plan accordingly.

Transparent Cloud Tiering

IBM already announced Transparent Cloud Tiering to IBM Bluemix, IBM Cloud Object Storage and the IBM TS7760 virtualization engine in R8.2.3 release. The new Release 8.3 of DS8880 now adds support for Amazon S3, providing yet another choice for where to migrate data sets to. IBM also adds replication, allowing the data set to be migrated to two separate target locations, for added availability, much like writing to separate ML2 tape cartridges.

Cascading FlashCopy

Cascading FlashCopy is a feature that has existing for awhile now on IBM XIV and SAN Volume Controller platforms, so this is just a port of that concept over to the DS8880 microcode. Now, if you FlashCopy target can become the source of a follow-on FlashCopy request. You can make copies of copies. This applies to both the volume and data set level functions.

Why would anyone do this? Well, you might suspend your application at midnight and create a clean FlashCopy of a 24-by-7 ever-changing database. Then in the following morning, workers who need a static "midnight version" of the database now can use this as their source and perform additional FlashCopy requests for their own needs.

IBM DS8880 MES Support

MES is an abbreviation for "Miscellaneous Equipment Specification", one of the many Three Letter Acronyms [TLA] that doesn't help knowing what the words stand for. In short, an MES is a formal supported option to upgrade a piece of hardware that is already installed and running at a client location. IBM will offer MES to upgrade existing DS8880 systems to have the additional HPFE Gen2 drawers, and to upgrade the I/O bays to support zHyperLink connections.

To learn more, my colleague, Jeff Barber, adds his thoughts on the In the Making group blog with his post [Integration by design: DS8880 and IBM Z].

(Final note: you might notice the change in upper and lower case. The IBM z14 (lower case) refers to the specific mainframe model, consistent with its predecessors the z13 and z13s, but the family name "IBM z Systems" has been shortened to "IBM Z®" (upper case). IBM Storage Systems and IBM POWER Systems were already upper case, so the mainframe guys just wanted to follow suit.  I suspect "IBM i" will remain lower case, however.)

technorati tags: IBM, IBM Z, IBM z14, mainframe, DS8000, DS8880, HPFE, HPFE Gen2, zHyperLinks, Cascading FlashCopy, MES, DWPD