Why is the IBM Storwize V7000 So Successful?

 

Posted on: 12/09/13

 

IBM has a great mid-range storage system offering that fits most business needs and has been successfully adopted by many clients worldwide for a few years now; and is still as strong as ever. It even would not look out of place in the Enterprise arena based on its scalability, but how did it gain such market adoption and momentum from its debut and how has it managed to remain a key player ever since?

When the product was launched it was advertised as a new product that was leading edge and not bleeding edge. But what does this mean? This requires a little history lesson. Years back IBM launched an enterprise class storage virtualisation device called the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) that promised to increase performance and add functionality to both your current and future storage systems. And it delivered.
 

Unfortunately it had a price tag as equally impressive. Due to the success and capabilities of the SVC, an entry edition was launched which offered similar hardware but with a revised pricing structure to make it affordable in the mid-market sector.
 

Because of the increased demand for the SVC portfolio, a package built around the IBM SVC and IBM DS5000 storage was launched known as the IBM Virtual Disk Solution (VDS). This brought with it the values of the SVC’s storage virtualisation along with actual storage capacity meaning it was suited to both current and new storage implementations.
 

But it turns out this product was just to ‘test the water’ so to speak. Having proven a demand for a new storage system that not only offered its own virtualised storage but could virtualise currently deployed IBM and non-IBM storage, the Storwize V7000 was born.
 

As opposed to the VDS package which included the two separate SVC nodes, associated UPSs and a DS5000 storage controller (and expansions), the Storwize V7000 brought all of this in to one physical 2U package. This runs the same code as the current Enterprise class SVCs, has all the resilience of a clustered SVC, and supports both its own internal and any other external storage which it then virtualises bringing its rich feature set to it. History lesson over.
 

The latest release of the Storwize V7000 code offers these key features:
 

• Scale-up with support for 240 internal disks and scale-out allowing for 4 dual-node controllers to be clustered as one logical V7000 supporting 960 internal disks and petabytes of externally virtualised storage, all managed through a single web based intuitive GUI.

• Real-time compression creating up to 80% space savings and increased performance for tier 1+ production applications and databases.

• EasyTier support which automatically and dynamically places compressed and uncompressed hot-data from normal hard disks on to SSDs bringing massive performance benefits with just a small amount of SSD.

• Synchronous and asynchronous replication to another V7000 or SVC for disaster recovery.

• Unified version available adding NAS protocol support such as CIFS and NFS to the system.

• Typical virtualisation features included such as snapshots, thin-provisioning, non-disruptive volume migration etc.

• Migration wizard to massively simplify and minimise the risk associated with migrating data from one storage system to another (itself or otherwise).
 

So, to answer the question as to why the V7000 is so successful ... there is little like it in the market place and by being cost competitive, incredibly simple and intuitive to manage, and offering everything and more than its competitors, it is difficult to find a storage infrastructure where it does not fit with a client’s business needs.

 

For more information on IBM Storwize V7000 please contact your Celerity Representatve

Edward Yates, Technical Consultant, Celerity Limited

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