So, it's IBM's turn to announcement some storage enhancements to their multitudinous array of storage products. The DS8K gets an enhanced pension plan in the form of SATA and SSDs, that should keep it going for a bit longer I guess. Leveraging the end-to-end understanding of the environment when using DB2 on mainframe makes a lot of sense; it is one of the areas that IBM probably has some key advantages; pity it’s so niche and specialised (but I suspect very high margin!).
A baby XIV..meh! Very meh! When are we going to see an XIV which has Infiniband/10GbE interconnects? When are we going to see an XIV which can dedupe, surely integration with Diligent must be on the roadmap? Perhaps an XIV which can support NAS protocols natively?
And the results of the much-vaunted SVC science experiment are now slowly emerging into the light. The devil of this will be in the detail! Will SVC be able to migrate hot blocks in at the extent level? So we don’t need to move complete LUNs into flash; this would have some major advantages, at the moment, leveraging SSDs is potentially a pain and can mean a lot of work relaying out file-systems and potentially changing standardised builds or being very wasteful and having things on SSD which do not need to be there. Now this has always been the case in that you may end up with complete file-systems/directory structures on faster disk than you would like but the premium has not been as bad as the premium currently charged for flash!
Moving onto flash at the extent/track/stripe level would take things much further. It would also be the basis to do really smart things and any array to be more fully optimised and tiered. Of course, it’d be really scarey and if you screwed up…it’d be horrid!
Anyway, EMC! Where’s this DMX-V(5); obviously not virtualisation!! We all know that you don’t believe in the storage virtualisation!! I have a picture in my mind of a bunch of shiny-suited salesmen worshipping a big, shiny, monolith labelled DMX…only for it to fall on them and squash them flat!
Ohhhh,….. the horror…. the horror of it all…..
Hmmm…storage optimized for virtualization. Now there’s a thought!
No – wait. We’re the ones who did SATA two years ago and Flash a year ago for our Enterprise arrays. Secure drive erase that doesn’t lock you into specific premium-priced drives (SATA too!) – 2 years ago. Not to mention humongous flash-friendly global cache – 6 years ago. And performance-optimized Flash for not only DB2, but Oracle, SQL Server, MS Exchange, TPF, SAP, etc., etc., etc.
My, but haven’t WE been leading the way again – try to keep up now, boys!
But NOW you got me thinking, Sir ‘Bod: what if V wasn’t for “5” but vi… oops…better stop before I’m redacted again!
http://thestorageanarchist.typepad.com/weblog/2008/12/1034-ive-been-working-on-the-redacted.html
;^)
Ahhhh Barry you trying to say that there’s been a feature / function slip from the (mythical) DMX-V into the (even more mythical) vi then? :)))