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IBM keeps it real with Storwize V7000
You might have something with this storage lark, Big Blue
Storagebod It has been very gratifying to see the IBM Storwize V7000 and SVC getting some real love from IBM over the past couple of years. The latest bunch of announcements are good: it'll be bigger and faster, says IBM, yet it presents this news with some realism.
IBM's in-house storage blogger Barry Whyte is not one to try and pull the wool over our eyes by quoting nonsensical performance figures.
The two features that catch the eye are the compression capabilities, which should work very well for databases and the likes, and Storage Pool Balancing, which ensures that all disks in a pool are delivering the same performance. The latter is the feature which is most important.
I wonder if the Storage Pool Balancing is the first step to putting a disk-hospital into the V7000, allowing a much lower-touch maintenance and a subsequent reduction in maintenance costs – to IBM, not to the customer, obviously.
Identifying disks that are performing slower than their peers by even minuscule levels is often the first indication that something is going wrong. It is also very important in IBM’s declustered RAID: something not yet announced in the V7000/SVC range. Yet this must be a feature for the near future as disks get ever bigger.
The use of Intel’s QuickAssist technology to enable the compression chip should bring future enhancements such as encryption and deduplication.
So the future is pretty bright for the SVC and V7000 … as long as IBM can actually manage to market and sell it.
If you also factor in the common look and feel across the storage range, you’d almost believe that IBM has a real future in storage.
I see that IBM is persisting with the V7000U as well. I keep wondering whether the next V7000U announcement will be a withdrawal from the market, but I guess IBM needs to keep trying to sell a traditional filer. ®