User manual IBM TS7700 OVERVIEW

[. . . ] Unlike IBM's old peer-to-peer architecture, the individual TS7700 nodes are managed as an integrated whole. Moreover, each node adds capacity to the local grid and sports new gigabit IP links for inter-node traffic. Another important architectural difference is that IBM now virtualizes the location and number of virtual volumes. This permits access and recovery from any node and was a key design goal. [. . . ] Sun VSM5: Sun has struggled for years with timely FICON support and has not yet made 4-Gbps FICON publicly available. Also, VSM5 lacks sufficient channels especially in clustered configurations. Performance Leapfrog is the best way to characterize vendor-specified performance. Sun's VSM hardware is based on a disk subsystem design that goes back to its original 1992 Iceberg product. Though revolutionary in design, that product and its many successors consistently failed to deliver competitive performance. As a consequence, Sun either sold on price or would deliver two systems in place of one -- true for both the disk and virtual tape versions. In addition, customers often complained that when improvements were made to the disk subsystem version, those improvements took too long to show up in VSM. Nonetheless, late last year, Sun finally released software and hardware upgrades that bring VSM5's specifications up to and in some cases exceeding IBM's. Not exactly a huge leap, but worth noting provided it proves out in real world environments. Workloads, block sizes, compression ratios, read/write ratios and architectural differences greatly impact the performance experience. IBM's TS7700 has a traditional front-end, controller, backend design where hosts/servers talk to the front end and real tape drives talk to the back end. Instead, there is only one set of channels that must be divided and dedicated to hosts, real tape drives, local cluster links and remote links. Under provisioning hurts ©2008 The Tod Point Group www. TheTodPointGroup. com Page 3 performance and over provisioning wastes money. Moreover, when workloads vary over time, users cannot dynamically shift these dedicated resources. In IBM's case, three nodes can behave like one big node offering three times the number of virtual tape drives and roughly three times the performance. Of course, Sun also scales when more nodes are added, but each node is treated and managed as an individual node. Data De-Duplication Data de-duplication has emerged as one of the hottest technologies in the market today and virtual tape is a prime opportunity. However, neither IBM nor Sun offers data deduplication for their mainframe virtual tape solutions. Sun recently announced a deal with Diligent Technologies, but this is just a reseller agreement and not an OEM agreement. Thus, as things stand today, Sun cannot integrate Diligent's software into its VSM. IBM, on the other hand, has had various forms of data reduction running for years in its Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and although TSM formed the software basis for the previous IBM virtual tape servers, the TS7700 has purpose built firmware. Moreover, we expect IBM to introduce native data de-duplication for TSM within six months or less. We believe IBM is developing its own data de-duplication core technologies and is expected to deliver this function in offerings across its portfolio including, of course, the TS7700. Green Storage If we compare a maximally configured virtual tape system, IBM's TS7700 uses roughly 16% less energy than Sun's VSM5. What's more, when comparing a total solution including virtual tape server, tape drives and tape robots, then IBM has half of the energy costs of Sun. Content Management and Tape File Systems A most subtle jewel lies at the center of IBM's new Tape Grid architecture and it begins with virtualizing the location of a virtual volume. [. . . ] As such we have only relied on information that is publicly available. We also note that Sun's web site and collateral materials often contain errors regarding VSM. Bottom Line IBM ranks highly on a vision and execution basis. It has listened well to the market and responded with an up-to-date solution. Sun continues to play catch-up and needs to become more open about its products and strategy. [. . . ]