Friday, October 8, 2010

IBM V7000 and SVC 6.1 – What IBM is Getting Right

On Thursday, IBM made some storage announcements: Storwise V7000, SVC 6.1 and DS8800. I’m going to ignore the DS8800 for now; it may be a needed upgrade, but the thunder was stolen in my opinion by the other two areas.

Storwise V7000

IBM has made a big decision introducing the V7000. IBM’s mid-tier lineup has consisted of two main OEM’d players over the last decade, LSI’s IBM DS3/4/5000 lineup, and NetApp’s IBM N-Series. The V7000 is not an OEM product, but an IBM product.

This is a big departure.

While I’m not expecting IBM to immediately ditch LSI or NetApp, IBM is clearly out making their own hardware. They had some well-known pieces DS8000, XIV and SVC; the V7000 joins this homegrown family.

So why do we care? By IBM making it’s own product, they get to dump their quite sizable intellectual property (IP) into the gear. The V7000 seems to combine some of their best products with a mid-tier price tag.

The hardware itself tries to be minimal. The controllers are built into the first shelf to conserve space with 12 and 24 drive varieties. The RAID is ported from the DS8000 line offering 0,1,5,6 and 10. You can grow to 10 enclosures (nine expansions) at the end of 1Q2011 (five today). You can fit a lot of capacity in 10 shelves, 240 TB supported in 20U. There’s SAS, NL-SAS (SATA that is SAS attached, to make it redundantly clear) and solid state SAS. It’s fully non-disruptive upgradable (NDU) from the drives to the software, according to IBM.

I have to admit, I was pretty unexcited at this point in the announcement. Then the bomb dropped.

IBM then integrated the SVC into the product and somewhat like the entry edition, you get to use it for free when virtualizing the V7000’s internal storage. What? The SVC, along with FlashCopy, Metro/GlobalMirror, internal mirroring, thin provisioning – all of it is built-in free of charge to use for this one box. You can use it as an regular-old SVC if you then add the familiar capacity-based charges of a traditional SVC by other virtualizing storage through it. Think NetApp V-Series, or HDS USP-V.

OK, that’s cool.

Then they retrofitted the V7000 and SVC functions to use XIV’s GUI. This is where I was starting to think – IBM what happened, this is sexy. You see, IBM has not exactly been known for making a decent GUI on their hardware platforms. When IBM bought XIV, people got nervous that IBM will ruin XIV’s wonderfully simple and easy to use GUI. Did IBM listen, you bet. They realized a great piece of IP and ported it to the V7000 (and the SVC).

Oh, and EasyTier is built-in too. Add Tivoli FlashCopy manager (the NetApp SnapManager equivalent) and you’ve got an easy to use hell of a product.

So now we’re taking some pretty boring storage (after all I was ho hum at that point in the call) and jazzed it up with the market-leading storage virtualization product on the market, easy-to-use GUI and EasyTier. All of this free/built-in without all of that annoying IBM per-TB pricing. I have to say, it’s pretty sexy. I like this box. (Sales to follow.)

Where does it fall short?

After the initial euphoria died out, I had to take a look at it – hard. My biggest dislike is it maintains FC-based mirroring. In plain English, I still need FibreChannel Routers to translate those FC packets into FCIP over a WAN. Plainer C-level English, more expensive. These days I expect my mid-tier disk to have an GigE or 10GbE interface saving me in expensive SAN gear. Now I have to admit – I sell expensive SAN gear and it is rock-solid when your reputation is on the line. But I see the industry, at least in mid-tier, going to Ethernet-based replication, at the very least as an option.

Honestly, I understand IBM put the SVC into it. To maintain maximum compatibility, they left the replication alone. But change is possible, as SVC 5.1 showed us introducing iSCSI. The IP stack is now in there. It would have been nice to see this option introduced. (SVC 7.1 anyone? Can I get a yeah?)

I’m willing to overlook this shortcoming in terms of the overall package. And mirroring between an SVC and V7000 (not sure if it’s officially supported but don’t know why it wouldn’t be) would be a very nice expansion of the product line.

SVC 6.1

So why would I ever buy an SVC again? My biggest workhorse of the SVC customer base was DS4/5000 behind a pair o’ SVCs. Now with the V7000, like the spaghetti sauce commercial used to say, it’s in there. How long until it makes it way into the DS8000 base?

Obviously, you can virtualize other storage (IBM, EMC, NetApp, HDS, Xiotech, Compellent, etc. more etc. and yet more etc.) behind a SVC making a nice neat package. And while I never really had a large problem with the SVC GUI (one of the best in my opinion), it also get’s the XIV-like facelift – coming to a cluster near you this November, in time for Christmas.

To confuse you, they’ve renamed some things to use more industry-standard terms that really do make more sense once you get used to them. Errors are now events. VDisk-to-host mappings are shortened to just host mappings. Managed disk (MDisk) groups become storage pools. Space efficient becomes thin provisioning, VDisks, volumes. These really do make sense.

The SVC also gets EasyTier, increased maximums for scalability (up to 8 GB extent sizes, 1 PB volumes, 256 WWNNs), new OSes (vSphere 4.1), new storage (IBM v7000, DS8800, EMC VMAX, Compellent and Fujitsu models). They also made some easier pricing models for XIV behind SVC.

So if you’re still asking why would I ever buy an SVC again, stay tuned for the active-active datacenter article (still in progress). The teaser – SVC’s with the right RPQs can be split across different datacenters where the V7000 as far as I can tell, can’t. And the big nodes with the large cache are still in the SVC.

What’s not in SVC 6.1

I’m still waiting for larger MDisks (or are they now storage pool members? hmm). I have larger drive arrays made of 450/600 GB drives squeezed into 4+P arrays and struggle to keep best practice 1 LUN/Array. Help a brother out, IBM. Please don’t let this slip on the roadmap again.

Big News

So while the V7000 has some really neat features bundled in a great price point, the SVC gets some real pizazz. The GUIs are so cool, I actually feel good about paying for SWMA.

Make no mistake, GUIs can and do sell storage. I’ve had deals undone after a requested demo, others made by it. Customer want easy to configure, easy to use storage. Not just carving disks either; NetApp’s understood for years that SnapManagers make daily life better and using snapshots practical. IBM has some solid IP going for them with the XIV GUI, and in a very un-IBM-like way, they’re capitalizing on it big. Add in Tivoli FlashCopy Manager and I’m getting some really cool storage management.

IBM just might be the storage company to watch out for. When I saw their announcement, I have to admit, I was really surprised.

After publishing this, IBM’s SVC 6.1 limits were posted and the the MDisk limits have been increased from 2 TB to 1 PB. IBM did help us out. Thanks!


  1. Hi Urban,

    We do support IP replication by means of Tivoli Fastback. This can be ordered as a bundle feature with the Storwize V7000. While this requires a server or guest to install the Fastback software, it does allow incremental replication over IP. The native IP replication is in the roadmap.

    As for FC replication, yes we have used the entire SVC code stack here, adding in the RAID and drive support, however as this does give us all the interop support of SVC on day1, we do need to make some changes to allow a "controller" to be seen as a replication peer in SVC. This was not deemed as a must have for release 1, but is again in plan.

    Glad you like the product in general.

  2. It will be interesting to see what IBM will do between the SVC and the V7000. Could the V7000 participate as an iogroup? If the SVC truly is scalable to 32 nodes, we may now have a good case for it.

  3. Yep! I am also interested what would IBm do on this. Thanks for sharing. This is really a good heads up for IT people like us. I will also share this to my friends.


  4. Almost a year later and we still have seen mum on native IP-based replication. Many people are put out by this.

    IBM really need to step up and commit to a date for this feature to take this otherwise elegantly designed box seriously.

    Fastback requires too much overhead, at least two servers and limited OS support.

  5. IP based replication was dependent upon RACE. Since realtime compression just made it into 6.4, I would expect it to be 6.5 or 6.6 (or 7.x equivalents) before that came about.

    And yah, Fastback for IP replication? Unless something magic is going on there, that's not replication. That's a backup repository that still has to be restored somewhere, and still has architectural performance limits. Sure, there's "Instant Restore", but that's just a fancy way of making the backup repository a read-only mirror copy for quicker access to the data. You still have to restore it somewhere, multiplying the storage cost.

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  7. Xaminmo,

    In an enterprise-class box (SVC) FC-IP-based replication isn't as big of a deal. Bandwidths are big enough to warrant a faster level of replication.

    The v7000 is a mid-tier box. In it's space, EMC, NetApp, Dell Compellent, Equallogic, Lefthand all have native-IP based replication. The v7000 has to add on $100,000 of extra gear to give native replication, or follow the backup/restore have of Fastback. I was hoping that we would have seen this by now. I've been holding out on selling this solution purely based on this fact. Over 80% of my customers replicate to a DR site.

    This is an eloquently designed solution. The auto-tiering would benefit from three tiers, but it's adequate. The GUI is the best on the market. Adding in IP-based replication would make this one of the best solutions on the market. I would have thought that iSCSI, adding the IP-protocol stack with SCSI-3 support would have been enough to enable replication. RACE would lower bandwidth requirement, which would be a plus.

    I've been waiting for IBM to add this, then I will start designing solution based on the product. For now, it adds too much cost to justify the box.