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Fall In Love with IBM FlashSystem V840 Enterprise Performance Solution

By Tony Pearson posted Tue February 11, 2014 05:24 PM

  

Originally posted by: TonyPearson


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

This week we also have [Valentine's day], so it is perfect time for you to fall in love with the new [IBM FlashSystem V840 Enterprise Performance Solution]! The "V" stands for Valentine.

FlashSystem v840

From the photo, the marketing people staggered the various components to give it a stylized [Dagwood Sandwich] effect. I can assure you that these are just standard 19-inch rack components that fit into 6U of space in standard IT racks.

Starting top to bottom, we have the first FlashSystem V840 Control Enclosure, its 1U-high UPS, a second FlashSystem V840 Control Enclosure and its UPS, and finally a 2U-high FlashSystem V840 Storage Enclosure.

You can have up to a dozen Flash modules, either 2TB or 4TB size, for a maximum of 40TB usable RAID-protected capacity. These can be protected with AES 256-bit encryption. The FlashSystem modules are front-loaded, and slide in and out for easy maintenance.

The system is fully redundant and hot-swappable with concurrent code load to ensure high availability.

(Update: In the comments, readers thought that this was nothing more than just a two-node SVC with FlashSystem 840. There are differences, so I have added the following table.)
Attribute SVC with FlashSystem 840 FlashSystem V840
Licensing per TB per enclosure
Cabling from controllers to storage Through SAN fabric ports Direct attach from V840 Controllers to V840 Storage Enclosures
Call Home Support Storwize FlashSystem
GUI screen branding Storwize FlashSystem

The system is fully VMware-certified, supporting VAAI interfaces, and an SRA for VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM). With Real-time Compression, you can get up to 80 percent capacity savings for workloads like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). That in effect gives you up to 5x (200TB) of virtual capacity in 6U of rack space!

You can either keep it as an All-Flash array, or you can virtualize external IBM and non-IBM disk systems, and use the Flash capacity in the Storage Enclosure for IBM's Easy Tier automated sub-volume tiering and data migration. With or without external storage, the FlashSystem V840 can provide local and remote mirroring and point-in-time copies.

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Comments

Archive User
Wed February 12, 2014 01:25 PM

Originally posted by: DEWF_Joe_Jurak


I've just read the storage announcement on the V840 and immediately began searching for additional info when I found that you've already blogged on this Tony. This does appear to be a 2-node SVC Cluster with the External UPS', and an 840 for the Storage Enclosure. What specifically differentiates this solution from an SVC Cluster with an 840 (other than the direct connect FlashSystem to the Control Enclosures)? I'm working on several FlashSystem / SVC architectures currently and this new system caught my eye. Is it intended to be a more self-contained mini-SVC / FlashSystems Cluster directed at specific Use-Cases? I love innovation and I am a HUGE fan of SVC with FlashSystems - but I am a bit disappointed to see the external UPS' on these Control Enclosures and the cabling that must accompany them... Looking forward to the SVC DH8 Engines with the internal batteries to eliminate these all together. Anyway - Looking forward to more Details soon!!

Archive User
Tue February 11, 2014 11:08 PM

Originally posted by: Kenneth_Van_Kley


Looks an awful lot like a 2-node SVC cluster with a FlashSystem 840. Should get some monster performance out of it. SVC for advanced features and virtualization, Flash for raw I/O power. Are they running stock SVC code on it or a customized variant?