Originally posted by: TonyPearson

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

(This week in the USA there are big elections. However, I am far, far away in Zurich, Switzerland writing IBM Redbooks.)

Storwize V7000 Model 724

The next generation of the Storwize V7000, officially model 724, supports NVMe and FC-NVMe (NVMe/FC) on 16Gbps adapters, and iSER on 25GbE adapters. You can cluster Storwize V7000 Gen2+, Storwize V7000 model 724, and FlashSystem 9100 series into the same cluster. There are some differences, shown in this table below:

Attribute	Storwize V7000 Gen2+	Storwize V7000 Model 724	FlashSystem 9110
Controller	V7000 Hybrid, V7000F all-flash	All-Flash	All-Flash
NVMe and FlashCore technology	No	Yes	Yes
Maximum raw capacity of Flash	368TB	461TB	461TB
Compression technology	Integrated hardware-assisted compression acceleration	FlashCore embedded and Integrated hardware-assisted compression acceleration	FlashCore embedded and Integrated hardware-assisted compression acceleration
Maximum DRAM cache memory	256GB	1.1TB	1.5TB
Host Interface Card slots	2	2	3
Expansion	HDD and SSD	HDD and SSD	SSD only
Installation and support	Customer set-up	Customer set-up	IBM set-up, Technical Advisor, and Enterprise-class support
Multicloud Solutions	No	Ready	Starter software included

To learn more, see [ IBM Storwize V7000 model 724] announcement letter.

 

Spectrum Virtualize V8.2.1

The latest software is now available for SVC, FlashSystem 9100 and V9000, and Storwize V7000 and V5000.

• NVMe over Fibre Channel support on 16 Gb Fibre Channel adapters extends the simplicity, efficiency, and end-to-end NVMe model where NVMe commands and structures are transferred end to end, requiring no translations. This is often written as FC-NVMe or NVMe/FC.
• Full IP-based quorum delivers support for administrators looking to consolidate their infrastructure over Ethernet. Previously, clients used a mix of IP-based and physical quorum disks.
• Increased host mappings to 64K, more than triple from the previous limitation of 20K.
• IBM Spectrum Insights provides a call home protocol that uses IBM IP to deliver a more robust path and higher bandwidth/higher frequency data transmission, with end-to-end confirmation of receipt.
• Single copy vdisk expand with format enables administrators to expand a vdisk without migrating the data off and back on. For example, if you want to expand a 100GB LUN to 150GB, you can do this, and the hardware will format the additional 50GB capacity.
• iSER support for host attachment with 25 GbE adapters expands the host connectivity options for SVC, FlashSystem V9000 and Storwize V5000. This is similar to the v8.2 support for Storwize V7000 and FlashSystem 9100.
• Clustering support over Ethernet using RDMA enables IBM Spectrum Virtualize software to run over multiple types of technology, including FlashSystem 9100 and V9000, SVC, and Storwize V7000. This was the last hold-out for all-Ethernet shops. IBM supported Ethernet host attachment, and Ethernet-based back-end storage, and Ethernet-based replication mirroring, so the last piece is now complete, Ethernet-based node-to-node communications needed for clustering.

To learn more, see [IBM Spectrum Virtualize V8.2.1] announcement letter.

 

Storage Utility Pricing

The IBM FlashSystem 9100 series, Storwize V7000 and V5000 now offer "storage utility" pricing, similar to what IBM offers for its other block storage devices.

To learn more, see [ IBM Storwize V5000 and V7000 utility models] and [ IBM FlashSystem 9100] announcement letters.

 

FlashSystem 9100 new SSD capacity

IBM FlashSystem 9100 now also supports a smaller 800GB solid-state drive, for clients looking for smaller configurations.

To learn more, see [ IBM FlashSystem 9100] announcement letter.

These enhancements can help clients modernize their workloads, and position themselves well for a Multicloud approach.