IBM SVC - Virtual and Real

Another well kept secret is actually from one of the leading storage vendors. According to IBM they have over 2,000 customers that have implemented the SVC. The IBM SVC is an appliance that can scale up to eight controller nodes that provides intelligent storage level virtualization in front of heterogeneous storage systems. It is used to create volumes, data migration and has snapshot and remote mirroring capability. IBM customers are using SVC as a way to migrate data between different storage systems creating an intelligent tiered storage environment. These end users are among the relatively few companies that actually do this. Most people still keep data stored on their tier one storage systems even though no one is accessing it. I did a 10 city tour talking about tiered storage and not one company has implemented any kind of ongoing movement of data between tiers. And most of the end users had 80% or more of their data that was never accessed 90 days after its creation. That means that in a 100 TB storage system over 80 TB was never used. Move that stuff off of Tier One storage onto another tier.

I am a big proponent of storage virtualization. We've done a great job of networking our host systems to storage. But storage systems are not networked with one another. They are silos. Individual systems. Storage virtualization actually enables your storage systems to be networked to one another. That is the power of external storage virtualization - it goes way beyond being an appliance that does data migration or heterogeneous replication - those are the actions - but the impact is a more fluid data center, greater utilization of our physical assets and the ability make our storage assets greater than the sum of their parts. Someone once said that eventually everything becomes a feature of the system. Eventually storage virtualization will become a feature of the storage system. IBM needs to appreciate this fact - and figure out what their strategies is in this regard.

IBM is a leader in storage virtualization even though they don't bang this drum loudly enough. Today the SVC and other storage virtualization solutions are being used for specific tasks such as data migration between different storage tiers. However, storage virtualization will be the way we perform storage networking in the future. It is important that IBM has this technology today and is learning more and more every day; adding more functionality; gaining customer insights; and making it a core competency.