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 is …
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Posted Wednesday 15th July 2009 09:03 GMT
Compellent has had this technology from the start, when all others claimed it was not needed and a bad idea. Interesting....
Posted Wednesday 15th July 2009 09:03 GMT
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...)
Posted Wednesday 15th July 2009 09:34 GMT
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.
Posted Wednesday 15th July 2009 10:57 GMT
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.
Posted Wednesday 15th July 2009 11:40 GMT
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.
Posted Wednesday 15th July 2009 14:38 GMT
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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