IBM Storwize - 'Taking a Technical View'

When IBM launched their all new, virtualised storage “Storwize” portfolio a few years back it consisted of a single product - the V7000. Today this is still the top-of-range model but the portfolio has expanded to include a couple of other systems.

 

The second model launched was the V3700. Like all in the range, this system runs the same SVC software as its V7000 big brother and so benefits from the same highly-intuitive GUI and ease of management, but has less hardware grunt inside and so sacrifices scalability and a couple of features. Scalability on the V3700 is considerably reduced as it only supports half the internal storage per controller and controllers cannot be clustered. Additionally, external storage virtualisation is lost meaning that the V3700 cannot manage external storage systems as if they were its own storage.

 

This is where the V5000 comes in. It fills in the gap between the top-of-range V7000 and the baby V3700. Using more powerful processing power and cache in the controllers’ two nodes, more storage can be attached to the V5000 and two V5000s can be clustered together. More key, however, is that SVC style external storage virtualisation is supported meaning that, like the V7000, it can manage external storage. This brings one of the key benefits of the SVC and V7000 code to the market at an even lower price point.
 

 

The V5000 offers a range of connectivity options including 10Gb iSCSI, FCoE or 8Gb FCP connectivity. As illustrated above, the appropriate I/O daughter card is installed meaning that while the V5000 does not offer the connection versatility of its bigger brother (as the V7000 natively offers all these protocols simultaneously) it can be configured to be suitable for either type of deployment.

A couple of other features are amiss such as compression, and extra cost licences are required to activate some other features that are included in the V7000 base code, but the V5000 is still a very powerful storage system that delivers everything many SMBs require at a price point making the technology even more competitive and affordable for more businesses.

 

The table below summarises some of the difference between the products in the Storwize family:

 

Per system so clustered models offer multiple of this value

Should you require further information regarding the IBM Storwize V5000 or have any storage requirements please do not hesitate to contact your Celerity Representative.

 

Edward Yates - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited

 

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Benefits of Virtualising your Storage

The main benefit of virtualising your server estate – is to maximise the utilisation of the hardware and reduce the physical server footprint - has been known and proven to I.T. professionals for many years and adopted in some way by most.

 

In addition to massively increasing the efficiency of the server estate and reducing the procurement and running costs of each (virtual) server, new functionality becomes available that would not otherwise be possible. This includes things like migrating the server from one piece of hardware to another, taking instantaneous backups of the server as a whole and moving it from one storage system to another, all without any disruption.

 

But typically many organisations stop there, yet most of the benefits of virtualisation can be brought to the storage too. By virtualising the storage platform you gain improved functionality and more advanced storage features. Not only does storage virtualisation enable more common features such as instantaneous point-in-time snapshots for back-up for example, but can also bring new features such as:

• Instantaneous cloning of volumes to allow testing and development of production data without any impact on the live services
• Manual and automated migration of volumes between different tiers of storage within and sometimes across storage systems
• New ways of protecting data and restoring system resilience after hardware failures allowing for faster rebuilds while reducing or eliminating the performance impact on the system
• Advanced functionality such as compression or de-duplication of tier 1 production data can be done at the storage level and is transparent to the applications and servers
• Offering both NAS and SAN connectivity protocols from a single, unified storage system to streamline system management

 

Not only does storage virtualisation bring these features to your environment along with a performance boost, but often does so in a smaller footprint which can dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership.

 

So we know what storage virtualisation can bring, but how is it achieved? Typically virtualisation of storage “achieves location independence by abstracting the physical location of the data”, or creates a new virtualisation layer (or pool) of storage and all the magic happens at that layer, rather than at the actual physical disk block level.
 

As oppose to data volumes residing on dedicated RAID arrays which need specific characteristics to meet the application’s demands, volumes are created at this storage pool layer which can be made up of multiple arrays meaning more performance and greater disk utilisation thanks to the large number of disks in the pool, yet offering ease of storage design and management.

 

Should you require more information on Virtualising your Storage, please do not hesitate to contact your Celerity Representative.

 

 

Edward Yates - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited

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