Originally posted by: TonyPearson

(Note: IBM [Guidelines] prevent me from picking blogfights, so this post is only to set the record straight on some misunderstandings, point to some positive press about IBM's leadership in this area, and for me to provide a different point of view.)

First, let's set the record straight on a few things. The [RedPaper is still in draft form] under review, and so some information has not yet been updated to reflect the current situation.

• You can have 16 or 32 SSD per DA pair. However, you can only have a maximum of 128 SSD drives total in any DS8100 or DS8300. In the case of the IBM DS8300 with 8 DA pairs, it makes more senseto spread the SSD out across all 8 pairs, and perhaps this is what confused BarryB.

• Yes, you can order an all-SSD model of the IBM DS8000 disk system. I don't see anywhere in the RedPaper that suggests otherwise, and I have confirmed with our offering manager that this is the case.

• The 73GB and 146GB are freshly manufactured from STEC. The 146GB drive and 200GB drives are actually the same drive but just formatted differently. The 200GB format does not offer as much spare capacity for wear-leveling, and are therefore intended only for read-intensive workloads. (Perhaps EMC wants you to find this out the hard way so that you replace them more often???) These reduced-spare-capacity formats may not be appropriate with some write-intensive workloads. Don't let anyone from EMC try to misrepresent the 73GB or 146GB drives from STEC as older, obsolete, collecting dust in a warehouse, or otherwise no longer manufactured by STEC.

• You can relocate data from HDD to SSD using "Data Set FlashCopy", a feature that does not involve host-based copy services, does not consume any MIPS on your System z mainframe, and is performed inside the DS8000 disk system. You can also use host-based copy services as well, but it is not the only way.

• You can use any supported level of z/OS with SSD in the IBM DS8000. There is ENHANCED support mentioned in the RedPaper that you get only with z/OS 1.8 and above, allowing you to create automation policies that place data sets onto SSD or non-SSD storage pools. This synergy makes SSD with IBM DS8000 superior to the initial offerings that EMC had offered without this OS support.

I find it amusing that BarryB's basic argument is that IBM's initial release of SSD disk on DS8000 is less than what the potential architecture could be extended to support much more. Actually, if you look at EMC's November release of Atmos, as well as their most recent announcement of V-Max, they basically say the same thing "Stay Tuned, this is just our initial release, with various restrictions and limitations, but more will follow." Architecturally, IBM DS8000 could support a mix of SSD and non-SSD on the same DA pairs, could support RAID6 and RAID10 as well, and could support larger capacity drives or use higher-capacity read-intensive formats. These could all be done via RPQ if needed, or in a follow-on release.

BarryB's second argument is that IBM is somehow "throwing cold water" on SSD technology. That somehow IBM is trying to discourage people from using SSD by offering disk systems with this technology. IBM offered SSD storage on BladeCenter servers LONG BEFORE any EMC disk system offering, and IBM continues to innovate in ways that allow the best business value of this new technology. Take for example this 24-page IBM Technical Brief:[IBM System z® and System Storage DS8000:Accelerating the SAP® Deposits Management Workload With Solid State Drives]. It is full of example configurations that show that SSD on IBM DS8000 can help in practical business applications. IBM takes a solution view, and worked with DB2, DFSMS, z/OS, High Performance FICON (zHPF), and down the stack to optimize performance to provide real business value innovation. Thanks to this synergy,IBM can provide 90 percent of the performance improvement with only 10 percent of the SSD disk capacity as EMC offerings. Now that's innovative!

The price and performance differences between FC and SATA (what EMC was mostly used to) is only 30-50 percent. But the price and performance differences between SSD and HDD is more than an order of magnitude in some cases 10-30x, similar to the differences between HDD and tape. Of course, if you want hybrid solutions that take best advantage of SSD+HDD, it makes more sense to go to IBM, the leading storage vendor that has been doing HDD+Tape hybrid solutions for the past 30 years. IBM understands this better, and has more experience dealing with these orders of magnitude than EMC.

But don't just take my word for it. Here is an excerpt from Jim Handy, from [Objective Analysis] market research firm, in a recent Weekly Review from [Pund-IT] (Volume 5, Issue 23--May 6, 2009):

"What about IBM? One thing that we are finding is that IBM really “Gets It” in the area offlash in the data center. Readers of the Pund-IT Review will not only recall that IBM Researchpushed its SSD-based “Quicksilver” storage system to one million IOPS using Fusion-ioflash-based storage, but they also may have noticed that the recent MySQL and mem-cachedappliances recently introduced by Schooner Information Technology are both flash-enableddevices introduced in partnership with IBM. Ironically, while other OEMs are takingthe cautious approach of introducing a standard SSD option to their systems first, IBM appearsto have been working on several approaches simultaneously to bring flash to thedata center not only in SSDs, but in innovative ways as well."

As for why STEC put out a press release on their own this week without a corresponding IBM press release, I can only say that IBM already announced all of this support back in February, and I blogged about it in my post [Dynamic Infrastructure - Disk Announcements 1Q09]. This is not the first time one of IBM's suppliers has tried to drum up business in this manner. Intel often funds promotions for IBM System x servers (the leading Intel-based servers in the industry) to help drive more business for their Xeon processor.

So, BarryB, perhaps its time for you to take out your green pen and work up another one of your all-too-common retraction and corrections.