A few months ago, IBM re-factored its internals. Spectrum Virtualize will continue to support its legacy storage pools, but also offered "Data Reduction Pools", or "DR pools" for short. At the time, this supported only Thin Provisioning and Compression. See fellow blogger Barry Whyte's post on [Data Reduction Pools] for more details.
Spectrum Virtualize 8.1.3 release now adds Data Duplication and RESTful API support for the Spectrum Virtualize family, including SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystem V9000 and Storwize products. These features also apply to Spectrum Virtualize as software only, and to Spectrum Virtualize for the Public Cloud.
Data Deduplication is a form of data footprint reduction. Like the deduplication in Spectrum Protect and FlashSystem A9000/R products, Spectrum Virtualize will use SHA1 hash codes to identify duplicate 8K blocks. If the hash code of the block about to be written does not match any existing hash code previously written to the cluster, it is considered unique data.
Legacy storage pools supported three kinds of volumes: fully-allocated, thin-provisioned, and compressed-thin volumes. The new DR pools support five kinds: fully-allocated, thin-provisioned, deduped-thin, compressed-thin, and deduped-compressed-thin volumes.
The new deduplication feature is included at no additional charge with the base Spectrum Virtualize license.
The RESTful API enables storage admins to easily automate common tasks with industry-standard tools. RestAPI support is available to interface with the command-line interface (CLI), create vDisk volumes and generate views normally available through the CLI, and secure authentication to the IBM Spectrum Virtualize family.
The SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystem V9000 and Storwize family now also support 12TB drives for internal storage. These are 7200 rpm 3.5 inch drives that can be in the 2U 12-bay or 5U 92-bay expansion drawers, or directly in the 12-bay Storwize controllers. Spectrum Virtualize 7.8.1 is the minimum level to support these high-capacity disks.
IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, available on IBM Cloud, has been enhanced to support a full eight node cluster (four node-pairs, or "I/O Groups" as they are called). This can be used as a target for remote mirror from your Spectrum Virtualize cluster on premises.
IBM offers data footprint reduction, high availability, and technical refresh guarantee programs for these products. See Ernie Pitt's blog post on [Peace of Mind with IBM Storage].
To learn more, see [Spectrum Virtualize 8.1.3] and [Spectrum Virtualize 12 TB Drives] press releases, and the [IBM Peace of Mind initiative] technical whitepaper.
IBM Spectrum Scale 5.0 is highly scalable file and object storage system. It is available as software, pre-built appliances, and in the Cloud.
The pre-built appliances are called "Elastic Storage Server", combining Spectrum Scale software on two IBM Power servers with drawers of flash or disk drives.
IBM introduces two new "Hybrid" models to the ESS family. GH14 has one 2U drawer with 24 Solid State Drives (SSD) combined with four 5U drawers with 7200rpm spinning disk. The GH2R has two 2U drawers with four 5U drawers.
Like the GS models, the SSD are either 3.84TB or 15.3TB capacities. The 5U drawers are similar to those in the GL models, either 4TB, 8TB or 10TB capacities.
A new Enterprise Slim Rack (S42) is now available to hold these. The S42 is available for all ESS orders, including the GS, GL and new GH models.
To learn more, see [ESS Hybrid Models] press release.
IBM has shortened the name of "Spectrum Control Storage Insights" to just "Storage Insights" and made it available in two flavors: Storage Insights, and Storage Insights Pro.
Storage Insights is a no-cost cloud Artificial Intelligence (AI) service that provides common monitoring capabilities to all of your IBM block-level storage, including IBM FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Storwize, DS8000 models and IBM XIV Storage Systems. Here are some of the capabilities offered:
- View the health, performance, and capacity of all your IBM-supported devices from a single place
- Filter storage device events to help you focus on the things that require your immediate attention
- Act on predictive insights provided by device intelligence before anomalies have an impact on service levels
- Use actionable data you get to resolve more issues on your own
- Open and view IBM support tickets
- Enable IBM Support to automatically collect log packages with no interaction with the client
IBM Storage Insights Pro includes everything in Storage Insights as well as these additional capabilities. This is a fee-based cloud service, licensed per TiB per month, for the added functionality:
- Customizable alerting
- Business impact analysis
- Data placement optimization with tier planning
- Capacity optimization with reclamation planning
- Supports file and object storage, including IBM Spectrum Scale, Elastic Storage Server (ESS), and IBM Cloud Object Storage (IBM COS)
Both Storage Insights and Storage Insights Pro use a "data collector" that runs on premises. This can be any bare metal server or Virtual Machine running Windows, Linux or AIX operating system connected to the SAN, with access to the Internet to upload the data to the IBM Cloud.
If you have IBM block storage today, there is no reason not to try this out. You can download the "data collector" and start using Storage Insights right away. If you like it, consider upgrading to Storage Insights Pro, or the full on-premise Spectrum Control product.
To learn more, see [Storage Insights] press release.