By Tony Pearson, Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for IBM System Storage
Well it’s Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements!
(Ha Ha! It is actually Monday. Some of these announcements were originally scheduled for October 28, but with [Enterprise 2014 conference] this week, and the [IBM System x, IBM PureSystems and IBM System Storage Technical University] next week, IBM executives moved up the date!)
We have a lot to cover, so I will do the quick recap today, and then go in-depth on subsequent posts.
- IBM FlashSystem 840 and V840
- The FlashSystem now offers a high-voltage 1300W power supply. There are two supplies providing redundancy. In the unlikely event that you are doing maintenance on one of them, the other supply handles all the workload. With the original power supply, the system slowed down the clock speeds to reduce electrical demand. The new power supplies can handle full performance. Also, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) now holds 300 days of performance data with pan-and-zoom capability. Five predefined graphs showing key performance metrics with additional user-defined metrics available for visualization. See the [Announcement letter 114-157] for details.
- IBM DS8870 Enhancements new v7.4 microcode
- The new v7.4 level of microcode combines features from v7.2.7 and v7.3 into a single code base. In previous 3-site mirroring implementations, you had A-to-B-to-C cascading. Metro Mirror would get the data from A-to-B, then Global Mirror would copy B-to-C. Multiple Target Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (PPRC) feature number 7025 allows you to have two separate paths of the data: A-to-B and separately A-to-C. Some folks refer to this as a “star” configuration. For System z mainframe clients, the new v7.4 introduces new zHyperWrite for DB2 database logs, enhances zGM (XRC) write pacing, and extends Easy Tier automated-tiering API to allow z/OS applications to influence placement on different tiers of storage. The High Performance Flash Enclosures (HPFE) that IBM introduced last May for the “A” frames are now available for “B” frames. You can have four HPFE in A, and another 4 in B. DS8870 now offers 600 GB 15K rpm SAS and 1.6 TB 2.5-inch SSD encryption drives for additional capacity and cost performance options to meet data growth demands within the same space. Both support data-at-rest encryption. Lastly, we have upgraded the OpenStack Cinder driver to the latest Juno release, including features like volume replication and volume retype. See the [Announcement letter 114-171] and [114-172] for details.
- IBM SAN24B-5 switches
- The latest SAN switch is a slim 1U high box that can be configured with 12 or 24 ports. These are 16Bps ports that can auto-negotiate down to 8Gbps, 4Gbps and 2Gbps. These are easy to set up, and can be managed with the IBM Network Advisor management software. See the [Announcement letter 114-162] for details.
- GPFS v4.1 and GPFS Storage Server
- GPFS is the core technology for IBM’s “Codename: Elastic Storage” initiative. You have several options. First, you can purchase just the GPFS software itself. It runs natively on AIX, Windows and Linux, and can be extended to support other operating systems through the use of NAS protocols like NFS or CIFS. Today, the Linux support which was previously just x86 and POWER has been extended to include Linux on System z mainframes as well. GPFS v4.1 offers “Native RAID” support, with de-clustered RAID in 8+2P and 8+3P configurations. Like the IBM XIV Storage System, this scatters the data across many drives, and can tolerate drive failures better than traditional RAID-5 configurations. Another option is to get a pre-configured “Converged” appliance that combines servers, storage and hardware. We already offer SONAS and the Storwize V7000 Unified, but IBM now offers the “GPFS Storage Server” running on the new P822L Linux-on-Power servers, RHEL v7, and and GPFS v4.1 with Native RAID to twin-tailed attached DCS3700 expansion drawers. Since GPFS provides the RAID, no need for DCS37000 controllers, saving clients substantial costs. For more details, see [Announcement letter 214-376] and [214-367].
- Storwize family
- The IBM Storwize family includes SAN Volume Controller, Storwize V7000, Storwize V7000 Unified, Storwize V5000, Storwize V3700 and Storwize V3500. The big announcement is that IBM now offers data-at-rest encryption for block data on internal drives in the new generation of Storwize V7000 and V7000 Unified models. There is no performance impact, and no need to purchase new SED-capable drives. Data-at-rest encryption helps in several ways. First, it protects data if a drive is pulled out and taken away maliciously. Second, it protects data if the drive fails and you want to send it back to the manufacturer for replacement. Third, it allows you to perform a “secure erase” so that the data can be sold or re-purposed without fear of anyone reading previous data. Initially, the encryption key management is built-in, with the keys stored on a USB memory stick physically attached to the model. In the future, IBM will extend this support to SVC, extend this support to external virtualized drives, and extend this support to IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager (SKLM). Other announcements include 16Gbps adapters for SVC, Storwize V7000 and V7000 Unified. The entire Storwize family will also enjoy both 1.8TB 10K RPM 2.5-inch drives, and 6TB 7200RPM 3.5-inch drives See the Announcement Letter (available later this month) for details.
- New TS1150 enterprise tape drives
- The anticipation is over! The new TS1150 tape drive has been announced, with 10TB raw un-compressed “JD” media cartridge capacity and 360 MB/sec throughput performance. The new drive is read/write compatible with TS1140 on JC, JY and JK media cartridges. See the [Announcement letter 114-165] and [114-163] for details.
- TS7720 now supports tape library attach
- For the virtual tape libraries for the System z platform, IBM offers two models. The TS7740 had a small amount of disk front ending tape library of physical tape. The TS7720 had a large amount of disk with no tape library. But then the person carrying the chocolate bar bumped into the person carrying the jar of peanut butter, and the rest is history. IBM will now allow tape attach on TS7720, best of both worlds! Large disk cache plus tape library attach. Tape-attached TS7720 configurations can have up to eight partitions, with different partitions have different policies. Some might move data from disk cache to tape more aggressively, while other partitions may keep data on disk for longer periods, or indefinitely if needed. Logical tape volumes can now be up to 25GB in size. See the [Announcement letter 114-167] for details.
- DCS3700 Disk System
- The DCS3700 is IBM’s entry-level disk system for sequential-oriented workloads. Today, IBM announced new disk drive options: 400GB 2.5-inch SSD, 800 GB 2.5-inch SSD, and 1.2TB 10K RPM 2.5-inch drive. All of these offer T10 Protection Information (PI) data integrity.
I won’t be attending this week’s [Enterprise 2014 conference], but I will be at the [IBM System x, IBM PureSystems and IBM System Storage Technical University] next week. If you will be in Dublin, Ireland next week, let me know!
This blog was originally posted on Inside System Storage