This article is more than 1 year old

IBM's mid-range storage blast

Storwize. But without compression

Mac-like GUI

The V7000's GUI is startling, having a MAC-style dock on the left-hand side of the screen with a 3D representation of the storage capacity and the array on its right, complete with traffic light-style health lights. Mousing over the dock items causes them to increase in size, exactly the same as mousing along the Mac dock.

IBM V7000 Screen GUI

There are buttons at the bottom of the screen that cause a pop-up window to be displayed with numeric and text information about elements of the V7000. You have full access to the command line scripts behind the GUI if you want. Indeed you can import scripts from the XIV and they will run.

The GUI is much, much easier to use than the SVC's command line interface, and provisioning storage is a matter of a few clicks and a five minutes or less. A provisioned LUN can be achieved in 10 clicks after inserting the installed system's USB key.

Seeing it in use, it is easy to wonder why all storage arrays aren't managed the same way. Whyte thought that SVC sysadmins might find themselves up to 10 times as productive in SVC management operations using it.

The V7000 is, in effect, a release 6 SVC product, and the two products share the same code base, meaning that current XIV customers get the XIV-derived GUI.

Storage strategy

IBM's storage strategy features overlapping products in the mid-range area, with the V7000  and the DS5000 both offering block-level access. IBM also resells N Series unified storage arrays sourced from NetApp offering both file and block storage. IBM has its own SONAS file-access products that scale up more than NetApp's FAS products, but these are enterprise-class.

Big Blue is not abandoning the DS storage line. Indeed, it has announced a new top-end DS8800 today as if to emphasise the point. But, as with HP, the storage times they are a changing, and our feeling is that the V7000, like the XIV, is a platform for the future, whereas the DS5000 and DS8000 products are existing and mature architectures that might face an ultimately more limited future than the XIV and V7000s.

IBM reckons that XIV and the V7000 are equivalent to 3PAR in terms of being new storage architectures. "When we bought XIV we looked at 3PAR and Compellent and we're pretty confident we have the right answer," Balog said.

IBM isn't revealing prices yet, but does say it will be competitively priced against existing mid-range storage suppliers. Big Blue classifies them into three groups.

Firstly, there are the traditional RAID 5 products such as CLARiiON and EVA, which have had the most mid-range market share for past 10 years. Secondly, there are the iSCSI arrays such as DEll/EqualLogic and HP P400 (LeftHand). Lastly there are startups such as Pillar, Compellent, and Xiotech.

"We compete with the top end of Compellent and 3PAR every day and have won over 600 new customers since the beginning of our XIV offering in 2007 ... This modular V7000 system will add to our competitive weapon armoury," Balog said.

The V7000 is a re-invented modular array with enterprise array features and a GUI that is like eye candy in its appeal. Its general availability commences on 12 November and the bulk of sales will be through IBM's channel partners. They will, we hazard a guess, be very happy to demo it. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like