IBM’s Storwize family, built upon their mature Enterprise standard SVC technology, has been one of their great success stories of the past few years. Customers bought into the exceptional virtualisation capabilities, transforming their existing storage placed below the SVC “engine”, offering mid-market customers Enterprise performance and manageability. There were, however, some limitations that potential converts highlighted as reasons why they may not invest. With just two tiers of storage, the products were short of offering the same levels as their direct competition, while the performance degradation with compression turned on meant that customers weren’t able to fully utilise the functionality they hoped.
But now – 4 years down the line – IBM have announced their first full refresh of the Storwize products (“Gen 2”), and there are significant improvements that address these and other issues. Primarily, the storage tiering and compression issues mentioned have been overcome. By introducing the ability to run three tiers (Flash/SSD, SAS, NL-SAS), users will see hot, warm and cold data being automatically moved to improve performance. With data being continuously monitored, and auto-rebalancing of workloads within each tier, customers can avoid hot spots without even needing to manage the storage.
This performance has been achieved by the new SVC engine, using Intel QuickAssist Technology, along with a new version of software (7.3.0), which has also enhanced the compression capabilities. IBM state that a V7000 Gen 2 with compression will outperform a Gen 1 model without compression, and this should leave the competition in its wake. IBM guarantee the performance on a case-by-case basis (following workload assessment and sizing), so customers should have every confidence in being able to utilise compression without a degradation in service offered to users.
And from a commercial perspective, the new pricing – including a change to a more simple and cost-effective software pricing model – offers lower upfront costs and a faster return on investment.
But as they say, the proof is in the pudding. So if you want to see if IBM are as good as their word, please contact Applied Technologies, who will provide a no-obligation demonstration, as well as offering a free sizing service based upon your own data requirements.
For more information and comment from IBM, visit https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/storagevirtualization/entry/next_generation_v7000_and_svc?lang=en
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