The company also announced a new performance benchmark for the latest and largest version of SAN Volume Controller, alongside support for additional hardware from EMC Corp, and conformance with the SMI-S storage management standard.
SVC first shipped just under 16 months ago and clearly does not qualify as a high volume product. Storage virtualization is a relatively immature technology, and one that requires a degree of customer faith because of the extent to which it takes control of their storage systems. But the 800 implementations claimed by IBM certainly demonstrates momentum, according to analysts.
That’s a pretty darn good number, said Diane McAdam, analyst at the Data Mobility Group. David Hill, principal at Mesabi Group LLC said it is an impressivefigure. Tony Asora, analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said: IBM is the leader of the pack.
IBM did not say how many of SVC installations are multiple implementations by the same customers, but said that in total it has sold around 1,000 licenses for the system.
Ron Riffe, storage strategist at IBM, said: The 800 are not proof-of-concept test implementations, or demonstration installations by our [channel] partners. They are live customer environment.
SVC like other virtualization products allows replication between heterogeneous storage devices, ending a degree of customer lock-in. SVC is part of IBM’s strategy to go straight at EMC, said Riffe. EMC for its part is the only large supplier not supporting its hardware when attached to the SVC (see separate story).
IBM yesterday also announced that it now supports the latest CX300, CX500 and CX700 versions of EMC’s mid-range Clariion disk array when connected to the SVC. This move plugs the last gaps in the SVC support list, and allows IBM to claim that it can now support all of EMC’s arrays, including both old and new Clarrions and Symmetrix, alongside all of Hitachi Ltd and Hewlett-Packard Co’s line-up, and of course IBM’s own gear.
The latest SPC-1 benchmark for the SVC was measured when the virtualization software was running across the largest 8 server node SVC implementation launched by IBM in October. This delivered 100,128 benchmark IOPS, a number that according to IBM demonstrates that the SVC can improve performance of the disk arrays that are attached to it.
The SVC has also been certified as conforming to the SMI-S storage management standard set. This is not related to the communication between SVC and third-party disk arrays. Instead it covers the communications between SVC and third-party storage management software tools. Any such tool supporting SMI-S can now talk to SVC via its SMI-S interface or API, and hence control the disk arrays attached to and virtualized by the SVC.
