IBM Storwize V7000 – a return to form for IBM?

I took some time out of my schedule to attend the storage launch of IBM’s latest and greatest mid-range

storage virtualisation product at the Tate Modern Museum in London last week. I was curious to see what was behind all this new marketing steam train of a new era in storage management. IBM hasn’t exactly set the world on fire over the course of the last number of years in the storage mid-range market, opting to OEM other technologies as part of the brand rather than develop their own IP. After all, IBM is a services company these days you know!

In a very low-key (squashed!) setting, there was a plethora of build up storage updates and announcements leading up to the new storage launch. After a short mid-stream break to waken up the sleepy audience, it was onto the big announcement of the day – the IBM Storwize V7000. The presentation was over in a flash, and even through Barry Whyte was on hand to give a hands-on demo of the new “child's play” management interface – the whole affair was a bit lacklustre – however, there was enough content to make us all sit up and listen as to what IBM was doing in this space. As an avid researcher and follower of trends in the data storage market, it's rare enough that a new storage product gets me excited – but this one did!

Over the course of the last few days, IT Villains have attacked our website to prevent us from making more IT Heroes!!!

Do not fear, for help is here! 

I just noticed that newcomer 3Leaf Systems posted some very impressive SPECjbb benchmarks for their upcoming Dynamic Data Center servers, which has nabbed them the #1 spot in the overall SPECjbb list - beating the closest rival by a factor of 2 and setting a new world record.

I'm not normally one to get too excited about benchmarks, but what is interesting is the sheer game-changing performance characteristics of the platform, especially when you factor in the cost considering that the platform is based on industry standard hardware and software.

So, how far do we want to go with this virtualisation business? We have server, storage and now I/O virtualistion!

While virtualised I/O is not new (The hypervisors in VMware, XenServer and  IBMPowerVM all present virtual path mappings to physical resources), an appliance virtualising both network and storage I/O is.

Xsigo is not a well-known name in the virtualisation world, especially on this side of the Atlantic, but for a relative newcomer to the market they are turning quite a few heads with their I/O virtualisation technology.

In a move to re-assure existing IBM p570 and p590 customers, IBM earlier this week announced a statement of direction for those customers looking to upgrade to the new POWER7 based systems.

The new POWER7 processors from IBM are due to be released some time next year.

IBM is keen to stress the relatively simple upgrade path for those customers with exisitng POWER6/POWER6+ systems. No fork-lift upgrades will be required allowing for the preservation of existing serial numbers. The upgrade process will involve replacing the "Processor Books" and "System Controllers" of existing systems.