IBM's mid-range storage blast

Storwize. But without compression

Majoring on efficiency

IBM is pushing a strong efficiency story here, saying this is a densely-packed system making good use of floor space. It also has lower energy needs than an all-3.5-inch array, and uses thin-provisioning to avoid allocating lots of storage space up front that won't get used for weeks or months.

All the storage is virtualised into a single pool spread across the three tiers, with LUNs carved out of it for servers.

The EasyTier feature watches the data I/O pattern and moves the most active sub-LUN-sized pieces of data, called extents, up to the SSD tier for the fastest response.

"Having 6 per cent of the capacity being solid state can deliver around 200 per cent performance improvement," said Doug Balog, an IBM VP and the disk storage business line executive. "EasyTier was developed by IBM research and monitors sub-LUN pieces (extents)  and puts hot extents on SSD with the rest on SATA. The extent size 16MB to 8GB and is settable, with the default being 256MB. The system learns over time as it watches the data patterns; it's autonomic."

The protection features are all inherited from the SVC with snapshots, clines, and replication. All the software features are bundled in except the Remote Mirror replication which is an option.

Why is there no compression, especially with the Storwize brand being used? (IBM recently completed the purchase of hardware compression company Storwize.)

Basically there hasn't been time, as the system was designed and in development before the Storwize acquisition. "Storwize does compression in a 1GB or 10GB NAS at the moment using RACE engine. It will work well with N-Series [and] will come as embedded block compression next year," Balog said.

Oh, it works well with the N-Series. Is NetApp going to OEM it? "Storwize has 100 customers and many include NetApp. We haven't announced anything regarding NetApp OEM'ing the technology," Balog said.