IBM Storage Announcements May 2014 – DS8870

Well, it’s Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM announcements!

I was afraid IBM was going to pile up all the announcements on one day at Edge next week, so I am glad that our new General Manager, Jamie Thomas, has agreed to spread them out a bit. Last week, IBM [announced new SAN Volume Controller and Storwize models], and yesterday, IBM [announced Elastic Storage].

Today is all about the [enhancements to the IBM System Storage DS8870], one of IBM’s Enterprise-class high-end disk systems.

High Performance Flash Enclosure

When IBM designed the DS8870, it changed the bulk power supplies and batteries used in the previous DS8800 model to highly energy-efficient [DC-UPS]. In addition to reducing the overall energy consumption of the DS8870, it also gave the engineers space above the units to put 4U of standard 19-inch rack equipment. The High Performance Flash Enclosure provides an ultra-dense and ultra-high-performance option. Each HPFE can delivers up to 250,000 IOPS and up to 3.4 GB/s bandwidth. Up to thirty 387 GB Enterprise Multi-Level Cell (eMLC) flash cards provide up to 11.6 TB of raw capacity, about 9.2 TB usable, in only 1U of 19-inch rack space. A pair of very powerful integrated SAS RAID engines manage RAID-5 across the flash cards. The HPFE attaches directly to GX++ slots in the two DS8870 POWER7+ controllers, rather than using the Device Adapter (DA) loops. You can have up to four of these HPFE in the “A” frame of your DS8870. Each HPFE can have either 16 or 30 flash cards. For 16 cards, you would have two spare plus two 6+P RAID-5 ranks. For 30 cards, you would add another two 6+P RAID-5 ranks.

Easy Tier Enhancements

Easy Tier is IBM’s market-leading sub-volume automated tiering inside the DS8870 disk system. There were several enhancements in this announcement. The first enhancement is to “Easy Tier Server”, a feature that coordinates caching of active blocks of data inside the server’s own internal Flash. This had supported Power Systems with EXP30 Ultra drawers, and now expanded to support IBM [Flash Adapter 90]. The IBM FlashAdapter 90 was announced last October as part of the [ IBM Power Systems feature new I/O enhancements]. The second enhancement is to the three-level (Flash,Enterprise,Nearline) tiering algorithm. Inside the DS8870, the new HPFE flash cards will be part of the “Flash Tier” along with solid state drives (SSD) attached to the DA loops. Internal inter-tier load-balancing will take into account the faster nature of the flash cards in the HPFE, and move the busiest blocks accordingly. We we refer to this as “micro-tiering” within the Flash Tier.

Broader Solid State Drive options

Not everybody likes the 400GB solid state drives IBM offered for the DA loops, so IBM is now offering a smaller 200GB and a larger 800GB options as well.

Enhanced Concurrent Code Load

The new DS8870 R7.3 firmware release drastically cuts the activation time of concurrent code load in half.

Reduced Warmstarts

Nobody likes warmstarts either. These are a necessary evil for some error conditions, but the clever engineers upstairs have figured out ways to reduce the number of warmstarts and eliminate the need to perform a warmstart after certain events to prevent any application impact to the attached host.

Multi-Target Remote Mirror

By now you know that IBM has the market-leading remote mirroring services for high-end disk systems, using less bandwidth and maintaining better concurrency than high-end systems from other vendors. The DS8870 R7.2.7 firmware release can now support multi-target remote mirror. In previous releases, if you wanted three-site disaster recovery, you relied on Metro/Global Mirror, where site “A” had a Metro Mirror to a bunker site “B”, and then site “B” had a Global Mirror to site “C”. Not everybody liked this. Some clients have asked for a “star” configuration, where “A”-to-”B” and “A”-to-”C” are independent of each other. A SCORE request is available for the following configurations:

• Two Metro Mirror
• One Metro Mirror and one Global Copy
• Two Global Copy

While Metro Mirror can support up to 300km distance, and Global Copy can go any distance around the planet, there is no reason why you can’t have one or both copies in the same building, or on campus nearby, for use with HyperSwap.

OpenStack Cinder interface support

Last but not least, the DS8870 now offers full support for OpenStack Havana and Icehouse releases. Support is provided through the OpenStack Cinder driver currently available for download. IBM is a platinum sponsor of the OpenStack foundation.

To learn more about the IBM [DS8870 disk system], or any other IBM Storage System solution for that matter, attend next week’s [IBM Edge 2014 conference]. Look for me, I’ll be there!