Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Well it's Tuesday, which means its time to look at recent announcements.While I was on vacation last week, IBM made a lot of storage announcements October 23.Josh Krischer gives his summary on WikiBon [October 2007 Review].Austin Modine of the The Register went so far as to say that [IBM goes crazy with storage system updates].

IBM System Storage DS8000 series

This is "Release 3" software/microcode upgrades on our existing "Turbo" hardware.

• IBM FlashCopy SE -- Here "SE" stands for Space Efficient. Rather than allocating a full 100% of the space for the FlashCopy destination, you can set aside just a fraction, and this will hold all the changed blocks, similar to whatIBM already offers on the DS4000 series.
• Dynamic Volume Expansion -- In the past, if you needed more space for a LUN, you had to carve out a newer one elsewhere, and then copy the data over from the old to the new, leaving the old LUN around to be re-used or leftstranded. With this enhancement, you can just upgrade the LUN in place, making it bigger as needed, similar to whatIBM already offers on the DS4000 series and SAN Volume Controller. This applies to CKD volumes for the System zmainframe users out there as well.
• Storage Pool Striping -- striping volumes across RAID ranks to eliminate or reduce hot-spots, and provide betterload balancing. Many used SAN Volume Controller in front of the DS8000 to do this, but now you can do it natively inthe DS8000 itself.
• z/OS Global Mirror Multiple Reader -- for System z customers, "z/OS Global Mirror" is the new name for XRC. Thisenhancement improves the throughput of sending updates to the remote disaster recovery location.
• DS Storage Manager enhancements, the element manager software has been enhanced, and is pre-installed on the new IBM System Storage Productivity Center, which I will talk about below.
• Intermix of DS8000 machine types -- this is especially useful to allow new frames to have co-terminating warrantieswith the base units. In other words, as you expand your system, you can ensure that the entire chunk of iron runs outof warranty all at the same time, to simplify your decision making process to upgrade or contract for extended service.

See the [DS8000 Announcement Letter] for more details.

IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller 4.2.1

BarryW summarizes the updates in the[Announced SVC 4.2.1] release.If you have problems with the link he provides in his post, here is the [SVC 4.2.1 Announcement Letter].

IBM System Storage Productivity Center

One of the biggest complaints about IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center is that it is software that needs to beinstalled on its own server, and that this installation process can take a day or two. Why wait? Now you can havea hardware console that has the DS8000 Storage Manager software, SVC Admin Console software, and IBM TotalStorageProductivity Center "Basic Edition" pre-installed. Here are the key features.

• Pre-installed and tested console
• DS8000 R3 GUI integration
• Cohabitation of SVC 4.2.1 GUI and CIMOM
• Automated device discovery
• Asset and capacity reporting, including tape library support
• Device configuration
• Advanced topology viewer

See the[System Storage Productivity Center - Announcement letter] for more details."Basic Edition" can be upgraded to "Standard Edition" to get full functionality.

IBM System Storage N series

Our "Release 9" applies across the board, from N3000 to N5000 to N7000 series models, includingnew host bus adapters, and the new Data OnTAP 7.2.4 release level.

The Virtual File Manager (VFM) was announced as one of our latest [Storage Virtualization Solutions]. VFMprovides a global namespace that aggregates the file systems from Linux, UNIX, and Windows file servers, as well asN series storage, into a consolidated environment.

See the [N series Announcement Letter] for more details.

IBM TS7520 Virtualization Engine

IBM's virtual tape library (VTL) for the distributed systems platform, has been enhanced to provide:

• Up to 12TB of disk cache, using 750GB SATA disk.
• F05 Tape Frames installed as TS7520 base units through a 32 port fibre channel switch
• Support for LTO generation 4 tape drives, both as virtual tape drives and as physical tape drives within IBM automated tape libraries attached to the TS7520. This allows you to use Encryption capabilities of LTO4.

See the [TS7520 Announcement Letter] for more details.

IBM System Storage DS6000 series

The latest 300GB 15K RPM drives are now supported.

IBM System Storage DS4000 series

This was a software/microcode upgrade release for the DS4000 series.

• RAID-6 support on the DS4700 Express models and the DS4200 Model 7V
• Support for greater than 2 TB volumes on selected supported operating systems
• 8K cache block size
• DS4000 Storage Manager v10.10 increases the number of FlashCopy tasks, remote mirror pairs, and storage partitions.

See the [DS4000 Announcement Letter] for more details.

IBM System Storage DS3000 series

DS3000 series now supports SATA disk, and can be attached to AIX and Linux on System p servers. This appliesto the DS3200, DS3300 and DS3400 models.See the [DS3000 Announcement Letter] for more details.

IBM System Storage TS2240

These are LTO4 Half-High drives, which can support encryption.See the [TS2240 Announcement Letter] for details.

Perhaps Austin is right, we might have gone crazy announcing all of this at once.

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