back to article IBM's DS8000 getting thin provisioning

IBM has added thin provisioning to its high-end DS8000 storage array and has enhanced its XIV storage product. Thin provisioning involves telling an application it has all the capacity it needs in the storage volume assigned to it, but actually only assigning the capacity needed to write data plus a margin. When this capacity …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Compellent

    Compellent has had this technology from the start, when all others claimed it was not needed and a bad idea. Interesting....

  2. Jan 7

    Very funny...

    with ~50kEur approx being what we would save (in new disks) using thin provisioning, I am not exactly amused by IBM charging us 50k to enable it.

    Ah well, they will learn when I get my AMS2500... That will teach them (and me, considering the work migrating 70TByte off some DS8k...)

  3. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    And IBM told me thin provisioning was too dangerous....

    This one has made me chuckle.

    We did an eval between DS8K and DMX4 last year and the IBM guys talked about the dangers of bringing things to market to early (large SATA / Enterprise flash drives) and about how dangerous it was to have thin provisioning as an option. Funny how thinks change when they actually have the technology available to them. Still, the 4 port 4Gbs FC HBA's (that only have a PCI-X throughtput of 4.3 gbs) that they call front end ports are still an epic fail to me.

    Posted AC, well just in case.

  4. Jan 7

    DS8k frontend

    Yup, the RIO connection certainly is the DS8ks weak spot. Since it already was the ESS weak spot, I was pretty disappointed they still kept it in the design.

    They should build a bigger XIV, using SAS drives, inifiniband and multi-frame scalability. I´d buy that.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    DS8000 - high end?

    It may be IBM's high end product but it's hardly a high end storage product.

    EMC, HDS and 3PAR cna beat the socks off this product - it's woefully slow and lacks scale/functionality.

    Moreover, here's IBM charging for functionality that EMC just announced is free - GRATIS - in the DMX.

  6. David W Johnson
    Thumb Up

    Just bought the XIV last month

    I'm definitely going to give IBM a call to upgrade my XIV. It won't be in production until late August but I like to see how the array handles a module going offline, adding new processor and bringing it back online. Not much data on the XIV yet so unfortunately I can't see how long it would take for the other 168 disk to sync up the other 12 drives in the module.

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