Inside the DS8700 Part 3 – Summary and Wrap-up

I’ve spent the past few weeks describing some of the technological underpinnings of IBM’s new DS8700.  In Part 1, I discussed the new POWER6 based processor complexes.  In Part 2, I examined the move from RIO-G buses to a PCI Express fabric.   Today, I am going to wrap up this series with a summary and some odds-and-ends that didn’t fit under any of the other topics.

Being Green

To get started, let’s talk about being green.  As companies have realized that being green (environmental) can directly translate to having more green ($$$), IT departments have come under scrutiny.  Let’s face it.  IT is a power-hungry activity.  After all, it’s no coincidence that more and more datacenters are being built next to power plants.  Customers have begun looking at metrics like work per watt, capacity per watt, and other measurements of power efficiency.  It’s no longer enough to be fast.  Efficiency is also a requirement.

The DS8700 takes advantage of the energy efficient design of the POWER6 processor to deliver highly efficient performance.  As an example, the DS8700 is capable of delivering 10 IOPS/watt using traditional spinning disk.  This is over 50% more IOPS/watt than the DS8300, which was already quite efficient.  Install solid state drives into the DS8700 and this number jumps even higher.  This makes the DS8700 an attractive consolidation vehicle for older, less energy efficient storage devices.  Going green to save green couldn’t be easier.

New Management Interface

As with prior releases, the R5 microcode includes enhancements to the DS8000 management GUI.  The DS8000 line has always been a customer configurable device.  There never has been a requirement to contract a vendor engineer to come and configure your device for you.  Starting in R3, IBM began a re-work of the GUI to make the configuration process faster and more intuitive.  The R5 GUI contains new visualizations that make it easier to see the relationships between logical constructs and the underlying physical hardware.  It also contains a new real-time performance graph to help storage administrators see what is going on under the covers of the machine.

DS8000 R5 Real-time Performance View

DS8000 R5 Hardware Visualizer

Summary

To summarize, I’m going to quote from IBM’s DS8700 announcement presentation.

The DS8700 announcement introduces the most advanced model in IBM’s DS8000 lineup with up to over a 150% boost in performance.  This new hardware refresh not only offers much higher performance, it also builds on the DS8000’s unrivaled reputation for reliability and investment protection by maintaining its IBM POWER-based architecture over generations of new models.

This release underscores the commitment to our flagship enterprise disk platform and enables us to continue providing an ideal combination of optimized performance, scalability, reliability, and value that our most demanding customers expect from IBM.

That sums it up rather nicely, doesn’t it?