IBM 2010 Oct 07 Announces Their Storwize V7000 Storage System

Oct 072010
 

IBM recently announced a new storage subsystem the Storwize V7000, which takes some of the DS8000, SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and XIV and combines them into one low-cost, highly compact storage solution.

Storwize V7000 Storage Subsystem

First, about the branding, IBM wanted something to signify storage intelligence and now that they own the Storwize brand they plan to use that nomenclature for this storage subsystem.  The V7000 does not contain any of the acquired company’s storage compression functionality, which IBM will rebrand as their Real-time Compression Appliance.

IBM’s new mid-range subsystem, the Storwize V7000 blends advanced functionality like Easy Tier and RAID from DS8000, storage virtualization from SVC and user interface from XIV into a highly compact storage subsystem.  The base Storwize V7000 subsystem comes in a 2U enclosure that contains up to 12-3.5” or 24-2.5” SAS connected drives and dual storage controllers.  At general availability, this base subsystem can be expanded by adding up to 4 more 2U drive bays (with 24-2.5” or 12-3.5” drives only) but a follow on release is planned which increases this to a maximum of 9 drive bays for a total of 10 sets of drives attached to the controllers.  The two storage controllers come equipped with 8-8Gbps FC ports and 4-1GigE iSCSI ports as well as 16GB of cache standard.

The Storwize V7000 drive support consists of 300GB-, 450GB- or 600GB-2.5” disk drives, 2TB-3.5” disk drives or 300GB STEC SSDs.  Interestingly, drives can be purchased in increments of one.  When fully configured with the base enclosure and 4 drive bays, the GA subsystem can support up to 120TB of raw storage.

The controller software is based on IBM’s very popular SVC storage virtualization system and includes all the advanced functionality of that system, e.g., thin provisioning and flash copy.  In addition, the Storwize V7000 contains Easy Tier automated storage tiering functionality originally available only on IBM’s DS8000 storage subsystem.

As the storage virtualization capabilities of the Storwize V7000 are based on IBM’s current SVC storage system, just about any heterogeneous storage subsystem can be FC connected to the Storwize V7000 and be managed as a single pool of storage. As such, any of the Storwize V7000 advanced functionality can be provided to any of its external storage as well as internal storage.

The Storwize V7000’s storage management has been designed to mimic the XIV GUI that has been well received by the customer community.  This new administration panels are very graphically oriented and hides much of the subsystem complexity behind judicious use of system defaults. Consequently, an administrator can deploy a out-of-the-box subsystem in 10 clicks and can configure a new volume in 6 clicks.

In addition to the onboard storage management, the Storwize V7000 can be purchased with a new, lightweight version of IBM’s Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC) to administer the SAN as well as Storwize V7000 storage.  Also, IBM’s Systems Director can be purchased with a new TPC plug-in that allows a single administrator to configure and manage from servers to Storwize V7000 storage with only one pane of glass. If needed, one can still purchase the full TPC in addition to Systems Director for even more administrative capability.

At announcement, IBM provided some impressive performance numbers with the base Storwize V7000.  The base subsystem can sustain over 950K cache read hits/second.  For non-cache operations, using internal storage only, the Storwize V7000 can perform about 80K disk reads or 24K disk writes per second (presumably, with a fully populated backend).

Also, IBM has gone to a bundled pricing model that includes the base system, the storage controllers/drive enclosure, all the storage functionality except Metro Mirror, Global Mirror and “full time” storage virtualization all of which can be purchased separately.  However, if one only needs virtualization to migrate data from other storage to the Storwize V7000, this transient use of storage virtualization can be had free of charge.

Announcement significance

When asked about how the Storwize V7000 fits within their current storage line up, IBM said they will continue to sell and enhance their DS3000 and DS5000 subsystems but over time those users should migrate to their new Storwize V7000.  In contrast, the Storwize V7000 and XIV seem to overlap and provide similar customer value using completely different architectures but both will coexist and be enhanced for the foreseeable future.  Finally, IBM’s current SVC will be re-targeted towards the higher end, enterprise customer.

The Storwize V7000’s high performance, compact size and advanced storage features make it a formidable mid-range storage subsystem.  A base 2U high storage subsystem with 24TB of SAS connected storage that can handle almost a million cache reads per second with optional storage virtualization seems almost like enterprise storage masquerading as a mid-range subsystem.

A PDF version of this can be found at

IBM 2010 Oct 07 announcement of Storwize V7000 Storage System (PDF 263.5 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

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SCI 2010 Feb 23 latest SPC benchmark results analysis

Feb 232010
 

We once again return to the classic block storage benchmark, the latest Storage Performance Council (SPC) results*.  Not much new in SPC-1C/E or -2C results so only SPC-1 and SPC-2 activity is discussed below.

SPC-1*results

(SCISPC100223-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISPC100223-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

There have been three new SPC-1 results this past quarter – two based on IBM SVC5.1 with DS8700 backends and one from Infortrend. Both new SVC5.1s managed to crack into the top 10 in IOPS™ performance as #1 and 2 with similar backend DS8700 hardware using 1024-146GB 15Krpm drives in two DS8700’s, 384GB of cache, and 16-4GFC connections each.  Each SVC node had 24 GB of memory/cache running with 4-8GFC connections.  The only difference between the two new SVC results was the number of nodes (6 for the top result and 4 for #2).

We have discussed other subsystems on this top 10 chart in previous dispatch editions and do not reiterate that here#. However, the rest of these subsystems seem to now pale in comparison to the 6-node SVC run.

(SCISPC100223-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISPC100223-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The only other changes for our other reported top 10 SPC-1 charts was on the IOPS/$/GB.  This is sort of a weird metric as it combines IOPS rate, subsystem cost and capacity into one performance number.

Here one can see the Infortrend storage subsystem hitting #1 on the top 10 and the SVC subsystems coming in as #3 and #7 respectively.  Infortrend was able to do so well because it combined high performance (180K IOPS), relatively low price (under $1M USD) with reasonable capacity (~49TB).  What strikes one when looking at this chart is that the 6-node SVC is so much better (almost 2X) than the 4-node subsystem.  Realize that the added performance for the 6-node subsystem at only small additional cost (~$31K USD difference) with equivalent capacity drove this IOPS/$/GB.  So if you’re interested in IOPS performance and running IBM SVC5.1, add nodes.

(SCISPC100223-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISPC100223-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

In previous discussions we showed SPC-1 scatter plots for IOPS vs. LRT, IOPS vs. $/GB.  In this report we now add IOPS vs. Subsystem Capacity.

What’s surprising here is the high correlation (R**2 of ~0.8) between capacity and performance.  Any subsystem above the line on this chart gets better performance out of its subsystem capacity than the norm.  This makes sense for the two IBM SVC runs (one above and the other below with equal capacity).  However the one significant outlier is TMS RAMSAN at around 250K IOPS using SSD, which has relatively small capacity and as such, shows up extremely well here.  The other, less significant outlier at around 275K IOPS with ~60TB was an IBM SVC4.3 benchmark run.

SPC-2 results

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(SCISPC100223-004) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

There have been only one new SPC-2 submission for the IBM DS8700 and it did break into the top 10 MPBS™ at #3 (see Figure 4. above).  The DS8700 used RAID5 and 300GB disk drives for its top 10 performance.  It’s somewhat surprising that there were no new SVC5.1 SPC-2 benchmark submissions but then perhaps they exhausted their budget doing the SPC-1 runs.

(SCISPC100223-005) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISPC100223-005) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

We have added the IBM DS8700 to our Top 10 MPBS spider chart showing the actual performance for all three classes of workloads in the SPC-2 benchmark.  Once again, HDS and IBM seem to have found some magic formula for their caching that allows their LDQ (large database query) to be significantly better than the other two workloads (VOD-video on demand and LFP-large file processing).  The IBM DS8700 LDQ performance is almost 30% better than their other results, fairly significant from my perspective.

Significance

It seems some of the lesser SPC benchmarks are not gaining as much traction as subsystem level benchmarks.  This could be a matter of time or maybe just popularity.  I see SPC has yet another benchmark coming, called the SPC-3BR benchmark for backup restore.  We can only applaud SPC for introducing more benchmarks but just wish more vendors would submit results for what’s currently available.

This performance dispatch was sent out to our newsletter subscribers in February of 2010.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more in-depth analysis of SAN storage system features and performance please take the time to examine our SAN Storage Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2010 February 23 Review of Latest SPC-1 and SPC-2 Performance results (PDF 773.3 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community.

* All results from www.storageperformance.org as of 27 August 2009

 

# See http://silvertonconsulting.com/cms1/dispatches/

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IBM 2009 Oct 20 announcement of new SVC SSD support, new SVC H/W and S/W

Oct 202009
 

Announcing IBM SVC SSD support, new H/W and S/W

IBM recently announced a new version of SVC software, hardware and SSD support.

SVC SSD support

The latest SVC hardware supports up to four 146GB SSD drives per engine, mirrored to the other storage engine in an IO group.  Adding SSD hardware as internal storage increases the number of IOPs that can be sustained from HDD configurations.  For instance, the same SVC IOPs could come from hard disk drives alone but far more would be required since SSDs process more IOPs than HDDs can.  SSDs can also be used to decrease IO response time for certain workloads and can be factory or field installed in the latest SVC engine hardware.

IBM is introducing the STEC ZEUS IOPS drive as the internal SSD storage for an SVC engine.  SVC engines are configured in pairs to form an I/O group and there can be up to four I/O groups in an SVC storage system (called a “cluster”).  As such, the maximum SVC system supports ~2.4 TB of mirrored user SSD storage capacity.

New SVC hardware

Concurrent with SSD support, IBM has also introduced new SVC hardware, the 2145-CF8 SVC engine.  The new engine is based on the IBM System x3350M2 server and supports quad core Intel Xeon® 5500 2.4GHz processors, up to 24GB of cache, and four 8Gps FC (8GFC).  According to IBM, the new CF8 engine can sustain up to twice the IOPs of the prior hardware as well as roughly double the bandwidth.  As such, CF8 performs up to 350K read miss IOPs (the SSDs alone can handle up to 200K read miss IOPs) and supports up to 5.8GB/sec read per throughput per I/O group and 4 times that for a full SVC system or cluster.

The CF8 engine replaces the old 8G4 engine however, the current entry level engine, 8A4, will continue to be shipped.  IBM says the new engine will cost the same as the old one, roughly doubling price performance.  Finally, the new engine can be non-disruptively added to operating SVC clusters or intermixed in pairs with existing engines.

New SVC5 software

In addition, IBM previewed new SVC5 software.  The new SVC software adds new iSCSI support,  multiple cluster mirroring options, increases the number of remote copy sessions supported concurrently, and supports a new multi-target reverse FlashCopy.  Furthermore, SVC5 software has been migrated to a new 64-bit platform and runs on all engine hardware shipped since October 2005.  Also, SVC’s cache algorithms have been improved and now support up to 15% more write operations per second over the prior release.  SVC5 software can be non-disruptively upgraded from the prior version. IBM also announced additions to SVC’s compatibility matrix.  SVC5 now supports EMC CX4-960, new 8 and 4GFC HBAs, and HDS AMS2100,2300&2500, HP MSA 2000, EVA 6400 & 8400, and Fujitsu Eternus 8K&4K.

All SVC engines have two GigE ports, one of which is used for service.  These ports can now be used to supply iSCSI target services to act as an iSCSI storage subsystem.  The service usage of the GigE can now be shared with ongoing iSCSI access to supported storage.

Understanding the new multiple cluster mirroring options takes some discussion.  Customers with up to 4-SVC systems or clusters can now have up to 3 of them replicate to a central, consolidated SVC cluster.  As such, the consolidated remote copy site can support each independent VDisk or LUN remote copy session as a separate Metro Mirror (synchronous) or Global Mirror (asynch) replication.  In addition, the maximum number of remote copy relationships has been increased to 8192 LUNs, to better support the multi-cluster mirroring option.  The 4-SVC clusters can be replicated in other topologies, e.g. cluster A can be mirrored to cluster B which mirrors to cluster C which mirrors to cluster D which mirrors back to cluster A.

Multi-target reverse FlashCopy support will also require additional discussion.  Recall that FlashCopy is SVC terminology for point-in-time VDisk copies.  One typically creates multiple FlashCopies each at a different point-in-time (p-i-t), used to provide multiple restore points.  With SVC5, FlashCopy restores no longer destroy the original source data.  As such, any p-i-t copy can be used to restore the original data while continuing to retain access to other p-i-t copies including the original data (in its state prior to restore).  The usefulness of this feature is arguable, but it does provide continued access to p-i-t copies after a FlashCopy restore completes.

New thin provisioning enhancements are also provided with SVC5.  Now, VDisk mirroring fully supports thin mirroring, i.e., mirroring will not copy blocks that are all 0’s.  Also, when running on the new model CF8 storage engine, SVC5 will not write “all-0 blocks” to storage.  Both new features conserve storage for thin provisioned volumes.

Announcement significance

Late last year IBM sold their 15,000th SVC engine and their 5,000th SVC cluster.  This announcement marks the next evolution in a very successful product.  IBM seems to be using SVC to attack the mid-market, selling a comprehensive storage solution that can support anyone’s SAN storage.  The addition of internal SSD storage should improve SVC performance, although SVC already had top 10 IO performance credentials#.  Whether the mid-market takes advantage or needs SSDs anytime soon is anyone’s guess.  However, SSDs do add a new tier of storage that can be advantageous to some enterprise customers and as such, broadens SVC’s market space.

A PDF version of this can be found at

IBM 2009 Oct 20 New SVC hardware and SSD support (PDF 261.4 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

# See our latest storage performance StorInt™ available at

http://www.silvertonconsulting.com/page2/page2d/storage_int_dispatch.html

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HP 2009 May 28 StorageWorks SMB Announcements

May 282009
 

HP StorageWorks SMB Announcements

HP announced on May 28th a new refresh to their MSA product line, their low-end unified storage line and a new line of virtualization solutions.

MSA Refresh

Earlier this year HP refreshed their EVA product line and now they move to the MSA product line.  HP’s new SAS JBOD or MSA2000sa G2 provides a direct attached storage solution while the new MSA2000i G2 provides iSCSI connectivity.  The new MSA2000fc G2 rounds out the MSA with their standard FC array support.

With the new MSA2000 G2 series HP now offers a new small form factor (SFF 2.5”) drive tray holding 24 drives.  The MSA2000 G2 series also now supports more drives than the MSA subsystems; up to 60-large form factor (LFF 3.5”) or 99-SFF drives.  In addition, G2 allows up to a maximum of 255 LUN snapshots and supports more LUNs, up to 512.  New support for VMware, HP-UX and Solaris was also released.

All the MSA2000 G2 products support the new SFF drive trays.  HP states that the new SFF drives use 50% less power than the LFF drives and offers 33% more storage capacity per unit of rack space.

New Virtualization Bundles

HP is now offering three new virtualization system bundles an:

  • Entry bundle which includes VMware Essentials software running on HP ProLiant G6 hardware,
  • Entry High Availability bundle which includes the above plus an upgrade to VMware Essentials+ and adds HP LeftHand P4000 VSA (LeftHand software running in a VM) and a ProCurve switch,
  • Scalable High Availability bundle which includes the above hardware plus an upgrade to HP LeftHand P4300 (standalone storage subsystem) and VMware Standard edition.

Such bundled offerings should make implementing server virtualization easier and make their low-end LeftHand solutions more channel ready.

Unified storage refresh

As an upgrade path for HP’s All-in-One storage and PSS standalone filers HP has now introduced the X1000 unified storage (filer and iSCSI support).  HP also announced the X3000, an upgrade path for previous PSS SAN storage gateways and PSS GW + MSA HA filers.

There are four versions of the new X1000:

  • Entry – supporting 4 LFF drives
  • Capacity Optimized – supporting 12 LFF drives
  • Performance – supporting 8 SFF drives
  • Blade – supporting two LFF drives

The new X1000 offerings increase file serving performance by 30% over previous offerings and combine file server, print services and iSCSI target support in one box.  The X1000 supports file based deduplication and integrates seamlessly into existing Windows environments.

The X3000 has all of the X1000 versions except for the Capacity Optimized packaging.  However as a gateway it can also attach SAN storage behind it and manage that storage as well as internal storage.

Announcement significance

In their announcement, HP’s refresh of MSA, new low-end filers, and new virtualization bundles reveal a significant and continuing interest in the mid- to low-end data center.  As for the low-end, despite the many startups, there remain only a few significant vendors interested in this space, which drives high volumes, albeit probably at low margins.  Such a business is a great complement to HP’s PC and low-end server business.

The continuing interest in SAS direct attached storage signals an ongoing need in today’s data center for “storage without frills”.  This probably bodes well for Symantec, Microsoft and others trying to dumb down storage.  The fact that HP is both advancing external storage functionality at the same time advancing JBOD capability indicates to us that both markets are significant and worth continuing investment.

A PDF version of this can be found at

HP 2009 May 28 Announces new SMB storage (PDF 246.0 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community.

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HP 2009 Mar 10 StorageWorks SVSP, EVA, and Data Protector Announcements

Mar 102009
 

HP StorageWorks SVSP, EVA, and Data Protector Announcements

Today, HP announces a new refresh to their EVA storage line and SVSP appliance as well as a new version of their Data Protector backup package.

EVA Refresh

Last year HP refreshed their low end EVA 4400, and today the rest of the EVA product line gets a refresh with the new EVA 8400 and 6400 storage subsystems.  The new products inherit the new 2U-12 slot drive trays of the 4400.  HP also announced today that EVA now supports vRAID6 arrays, a 32TB (up from 2TB) LUN size and SSD drives (from STEC).

It seems everyone is moving to support SSDs.  HP indicated that they only support a maximum of 8 SSD drives behind one EVA and believes there exists only a few business cases where SSDs behind an EVA makes sense.

In addition, both the EVA 6400 and 8400 now provide better capacity footprint and density.  The 8400 now supports up to 22GB of cache for applications requiring more pre-fetch or a high amount of burst write data.  The 6400 and 8400 now support up to 64 LUN snapshots up from a maximum of 16 previously.  HP Command View the EVA configurator and manager now performs better and the Replication Solution Manager now supports all EVA generations for both local and remote replication environments.  Finally, Dynamic Capacity Manager now supports Linux LUNs, which allows customers to both expand and shrink LUNs for Linux and Windows operating systems.

The EVA is 4Gb FC throughout its architecture.  EVA’s iSCSI attach is provided by a separate appliance installed in front of the EVA.  There was some mention of increased backend or replication FC ports but no information was supplied to validate this.  Front-end FC port counts have not changed from prior generation EVA products.

SVSP virtualization appliance

HP announced late last year the SVSP, an OEMed, fabric-based, out-of-band storage virtualization appliance and is enhancing it today with a new release.  The SVSP now supports more data path modules, which provides better performance and/or support for larger storage configurations.  HP also increased domain support (synchronous replication) out to a campus-sized environment, now supporting heterogeneous synchronous copy services up to a distance of just under 25KM between nodes.  Also, HP expanded the list of compatible O/S and storage devices supported by the SVSP.

The SVSP as released last year supported heterogeneous, non-disrupting data migration, storage pooling, thin provisioning, LUN snapshot, LUN cloning, local synchronous heterogeneous mirroring, and remote asynchronous heterogeneous replication services.  HP targets the SVSP for environments that have between 10-50TB of heterogeneous storage.  Such data centers have great difficulty managing all the heterogeneous storage and a product like SVSP can help them to manage their storage environment much more effectively.

Data Protector 6.1

Data Protector now supports one central repository for all encryption keys required throughout an enterprise.  As such, Data Protector managed encryption keys could be used by LTO-4 encrypting tape drives, network encryption engines and/or other security applications throughout the data center.  Data Protector has also improved its integration with VMware system services to better support VM backup, snapshots, and restores.  Finally Data Protector now better manages deduplication appliances such as VLS9000 and D2D4112 as well as supporting a completely incremental backup service that no longer depends on taking occasional full backups.

Announcement significance

In their announcement, HP’s refresh of EVA and enhancements to SVSP functionality reveals a continuing interest in the midrange data center.  HP also touched on product positioning for their recent Lefthand Networks acquisition.  HP currently positions Lefthand products between HP’s EVA and MSA storage product lines and seems to be using it as an easy way to convert customers from DAS environments to SAN storage.

A PDF version of this can be found at

HP 2009 March 10 Announcement of refreshed EVA 8400 and 6400 (PDF 232.8 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community.

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