VM-Aware

IBM have quietly and I mean quietly announced the release of the new Mid-Enterprise storage range, the XIV storage range has had two press releases here and here.

This is one of the most low key announcements I have ever seen from any vendor about something so important to their hardware product line.

If you want some more information about the capabilities of the XIV range then check out these two links:

The Storage Anarchist

Blocks & Files

Blocks & Files, an excellent storage related blog, has started a multi-part blog post about IBMs forthcoming storage range - XIV.

I implement IBM storage on a fairly regular basis and have mostly excellent experiences, but some of the ranges are either getting long in the tooth, or are just not as feature rich as they could be.

It is interesting to see that IBM seem to be addressing these issues with XIV being a replacement for the entire enterprise level storage.

Read all the articles here, here and here.

A number of customers have mentioned over the years that surely IBM & HP must be worried about virtualisation impinging on overall hardware sales. I always said that the kinds of servers that people buy for virtualisation are usually significantly more expensive than the customers would previously have purchased. This means that the volume might be lower, but the overall spend has a tendency to be as high if not higher.

This seems to have been the case for IBM at least as they have managed to get back to the top of the server hardware sales tree in the second quarter. With revenues topping $3.9B according to Gartner which means they overtake HP with total sales at $3.8B. The interesting bit to me is how IBM can sell less than half (302,000) that of HP (680,000) and still make more money.

I read about this story over at the Avastu Blog of Tarry Singh. I particularly like this blog for its informative and insightful post.

IBM’s SVC has been around for a good few years now and it is by all accounts quite popular. It does a great job of aggregating lots of disparate storage (IBM and Non-IBM) and presenting through a more scalable and manageable interface.

Well SVC has had a make-over with the release of 4.3 and some of the key feature announced in the press release are:

• Space Efficient Virtual Disks - Or as everybody else calls it Thin Provisioning
• Space Efficient FlashCopy - Or as everybody else calls it Thin Provisioned Snapshots
• Virtual Disk Mirroring - Or as everybody else calls it High Availability
• Improved Interoperability - Or as everybody else calls it… err Improved Interoperability (Mac OS X Server and WIndows 2008)

All good stuff that is already available in something like DataCore and is a very welcome addition to a mature product.

I work with IBM kit a lot and have always found the IBM Redbooks incredibly useful.

You can find a multitude of useful documents over at the home of Redbooks on all kinds of topics.  There is obviously a very strong IBM bias, but areas such as SAN configuration have large swathes that very generic and universally useful.

A couple of recent additions that have caught my eye are:

1. VMware VI3 on BladeCenter and System x Integrated with System i
2. Disaster Recovery Procedures for Microsoft SQL 2000 and 2005 using N series
3. Implementing an IBM/Brocade SAN

As you can see the titles often refer solely to IBM kit, but Redbooks 2 & 3 refer to generic hardware in NetApp (NSeries) and Brocade SANs respectively.

Hopefully you’ll find them as useful as I do.

I found a useful page on the VMware website that outlines hardware vendors support paths for Microsoft products running in VMware.

Check it out here.