Two weeks ago IBM announced high end disk system DS8800 - the fourth generation of DS8000 family. I will not describe new features, all of them you can find here. What's interesting to notice is that comparing competitors IBM has chosen right approach to build high-end family. Less than one year was enough to build the new generation of disk storage high-end. Of course, looking at announcement dates of the some features, it is possible to think that this product was announced as a response to HDS VSP and now could be a little unripe, but IBM doesn't need to create the new core of the system since DS8100. DS8800 consists of components almost all of which are not unique, what allows to quickly react on market conditions and more effective create the next generation.
On the other hand, IBM is integrating and unifying components of different storage systems (SVC, DS8000, V7000), and I hope that it might be possible in the near future to build a solution from different midrange and high-end bricks, which would be fully compatible on the firmware level.
Still sticking to server based controllers; putting max. of 4 nos. P6 is a question mark whether market can accept DS8800 as a real enterprise class disk system?
ReplyDeleteSub LUN tiering limited to 2 tiers only is also a weakness that enterprise storage giants HDS and EMC are gonna expoit.