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Submit! (to the System Storage Interoperation Center)
When using the IBM System Storage Interoperation Center (SSIC) you need to submit! I have recently come across two situations where technology combinations appeared to be supported, but there were...
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A Quick IBM ProtecTIER (Dedup VTL) Update
This is a very brief update designed to help clarify a few things about IBM’s ProtecTIER dedup VTL solutions. The details of the software functions I will leave to the redbooks (see links below). What...
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SANSlide WAN Optimization Appliances
WAN optimization is not something that storage vendors traditionally put into their storage controllers. Storage replication traffic has to fend for itself out in the WAN world, and replication...
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IBM Storwize 7.2 wins by a SANSlide
So following my recent blog post on SANSlide WAN optimization appliances for use with Storwize replication, IBM has just announced Storwize 7.2 (available December) which includes not only replication...
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Another Storwize Global Mirror Best Practice Tip
Tip: When running production-style workloads alongside Global Mirror continuous replication secondary volumes on one Storwize system, best practice is to put the production and DR workloads into...
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IBM FlashSystem 840 for Legacy-free Flash
Flash storage is at an interesting place and it’s worth taking the time to understand IBM’s new FlashSystem 840 and how it might be useful. A traditional approach to flash is to treat it like a fast...
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Building Scale-out NAS with IBM Storwize V7000 Unified
If you need scalable NAS and what you’re primarily interested in is capacity scaling, with less emphasis on performance, and more on cost-effective entry price, then you might be interested in building...
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My name is Storage and I’ll be your Server tonight…
Ever since companies like Data General moved RAID control into an external disk sub-system back in the early ’90s it has been standard received knowledge that servers and storage should be separate....
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IBM Storwize V7000 RtC: “Freshly Squeezed” Revisited
Back in 2012 after IBM announced Real-time Compression (RtC) for Storwize disk systems I covered the technology in a post entitled “Freshly Squeezed“. The challenge with RtC in practice turned out to...
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IBM Software-defined Storage
The phrase ‘Software-defined Storage’ (SDS) has quickly become one of the most widely used marketing buzz terms in storage. It seems to have originated from Nicira’s use of the term ‘Software-defined...
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Storage Spaghetti Anyone?
I recall Tom West (Chief Scientist at Data General, and star of Soul of a New Machine) once saying to me when he visited New Zealand that there was an old saying “Hardware lasts three years, Operating...
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Panzura – Distributed Locking & Cloud Gateway for CAD
I have been watching the multi-site distributed NAS space for some years now. There have been some interesting products including Netapp’s Flexcache which looked nice but never really seemed to get...
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Comprestimator Guesstimator
Hey folks, just a quick post for you based on recent experience of IBM’s NAS Comprestimator utility for Storwize V7000 Unified where it completely failed to predict an outcome that I had personally...
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