It has been very gratifying to see the V7000 and SVC getting some real love from IBM over the past couple of years; it’s a product which is going from strength to strength. The latest bunch of announcements are good; bigger, faster and yet presented with realism; Barry 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 that should work very well for databases and the likes; Storage Pool Balancing, ensure that all disks in a pool are delivering the same performance 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 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 but must be expected 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 have a real future in storage…
p.s I see that IBM are persisting with the V7000U as well; I keep wondering whether the next V7000U announcement will be a withdrawal from market but I guess IBM need to keep trying to sell a traditional filer.
