| Parameter | Open System | IBM z System (Mainframe) |
| Storage Type | FBA (Fixed Block Architecture) | CKD (Count Key Data) |
| Connectivity | Fibre Channel/SCSI etc | ESCON/FICON |
| Character sets | ASCII | EBCDIC |
| Extent Size | 16 MiB, 1GiB | 21 cylinders (or) 1113 cylinders |
| Base | Used by many OEMs | IBM proprietary |
Note: Whether Flash or HDD, it’s still an emulated track for zOS or FB environments
Just thought of doing small write-up on IBM Spectrum Storage Offerings. Even though you can find many articles related to these Offerings, I’m sure those who are reading this can get an eagle-view understanding of our flagship products.
Important Note:
Licensing terms may vary time-to-time and please visit IBM website to get the most accurate and current one. The views expressed are my own.
Now, let’s jump into each of the product offerings listed above. I’ve captured only an overview here and you can deep-dive into the products by landing to IBM sites.
Spectrum Virtualize is an amazingly powerful software stack for our storage products. It is available in 3 modes of distribution
Spectrum Virtualize provides rich set of features including the below (but not limited to)
Initially, data protection was simply backing up of raw business data to tape and today data protection evolved a lot with snapshots, replication, immutable copies, backup to cloud (air gap isolation), forever incremental backups and etc.,
Spectrum Protect is a Modern Data Protection Offering. More than just backup & recovery, Spectrum Protect is used for achieving Cyber Resiliency, Data re-use for various use cases analytical & reporting purposes.
Spectrum Protect can be obtained as Individual Products depending upon the requirement, Suite and Bundled modes. It is measured in PVU (Processor Value Unit) and in Tiered FETB / BETB. Reach out to IBM Seller to get suggestion on choosing the right (optimal) licensing for your requirements.
Spectrum Protect Plus is primarily used in VMware & Hyper-V virtualized environments. SPP available in ready-made virtual appliance. So that, customer can install it in minutes and configure it in few hours. Spectrum protect Plus can be integrated with Spectrum Protect.
Current release of Spectrum Protect Plus – 10.1.5 supports below workloads,
We used to call Spectrum Archive as LTFS (Linear Tape File System) earlier days.
If you want to read the data from your existing cartridge’s, we must have to use the backup software which was used to backup the data. With LTFS approach, cartridge is self-identifying and you can just load the cartridge in the tape drive and you can see everything that’s there in the drive. It is as good as inserting a USB storage media on your laptop and reading what is inside.
LTFS Journey:
Spectrum Scale and Spectrum Archive together can create the data tiering capability from Flash to disk to slower disk and to tape
IBM Spectrum Discover is a user-friendly tool that automatically and continuously catalogs all of the objects from the data source, in real-time using metadata, into a powerful and customizable database. Users can locate and identify the most relevant data regardless of its type or location. Using either a simple SQL query command or actionable API scripts or commands, users can enable comprehensive insight into their data in a fast and efficient way. This is incredibly important when you consider the velocity of data arriving from your source data for any analytics.
Spectrum Scale is a software defined file storage (GPFS-General Parallel File System) offering, with high performance and extreme scalability. It supports file systems with sizes of tens of petabytes that contain billions of files and can be accessed by thousands of nodes in a cluster.
Spectrum Scale can provide a single global namespace, offering a single point of management. The data can be accessed across multiple sites enabling global collaboration.
Elastic Storage Server (ESS) with IBM Spectrum Scale integration provides an optimal building block for a high performance, highly scalable solution.
We’ll discuss about ESS little later.
IBMer’s call it as iCOS (IBM Cloud Object Storage). Highly scalable, low cost per TB storage platform that leverages best-in-class object storage design for storing files and objects. With its ‘S3’ interface, it scales to any Cloud offering, meaning no vendor lock-in.
Storage Insights and Storage Insights-Pro are Cloud based Monitoring platform. Storage Insights is free and it is available to use with all our Block storage that we ship. With Storage Insights, customer will have the ability to monitor their capacity and performance stats of IBM Block Storage for a period of 1 day.
Storage Insights-Pro is a commercial edition and it can monitor both IBM and Non-IBM’s Block Storage, File and Object Storage. Customer can retain their performance stats for a period of 2 years. With SI-Pro, we can schedule and receive reports on performance, capacity, inventory, and health. Also, we can create our own alerts by applying hundreds of conditions. SI-Pro will also provide reclamation insights on space wasters to get them freed-up and re-used for some other workloads/purposes.
Storage Insights-Pro Subscription Price Estimator: https://ibm.biz/insightsprice
Subscription starts from minimum of 50TB capacity and then increments of 10TB
Both Storage Insights and Insights-Pro edition are SaaS based offering. Hence, we (IBM) takes care of patching & management of backend platform. We have to deploy a “Data Collector” in customer set-up (it can be a VM) and it will collects the metrics from connected storage arrays and forward it to IBM Storage Insights Cloud over secured HTTPS protocol. Data at rest is AES 256-bit encrypted and it meets below regulatory standards,
Screenshot of the Storage Insights Dashboard is here for your view:
There are other script based tools available to gather the perf stats for performance analysis,
QPERF (http://ibm.biz/qperftool)
stor2rrd
svc-perf
Spectrum Control (former name: TPC)
IBM Spectrum Control is a comprehensive solution that can significantly improve monitoring, automation and analytics capabilities in multi-vendor storage environments. IBM Spectrum Control helps manage storage systems, software- defined storage, storage-area network (SAN) fabrics and Hypervisors, devices. It will give holistic view of the customer’s infrastructure.
Spectrum Control to be deployed in on-premises and customer can choose the retention period based on their internal requirements.
Licensing:
IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management (Spectrum CDM) is a snapshot and replication management application for storage environments. Spectrum CDM provides data protection in an efficient, automated, scalable, and easy to use way. And it delivers data access that is urgently needed to transform organizations.
For instance, in Spectrum Protect Plus, copies are maintained in vSnap storage repository whereas Spectrum CDM will manage and maintain the copies within the same array.
IBM TechU Talks is a series of free technical training webcasts from April 7 through July 2 under each platform (i.e. 12 sessions for IBM Power Systems, 12 sessions for Storage and 12 sessions for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE).
You get direct access to 36 specialized IBM Systems technical training sessions that will help you continue to secure and protect your IT security infrastructure, prove compliance and grow your business securely. Get the insight on IBM Systems breakthroughs of today and tomorrow.
Register today for this complimentary webcast series. www.ibm.com/training/events/techutalks
Happy Learning..!
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