TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller – originally codenamed LodeStone – will ship on July 25, as a block-level storage virtualization system. LodeStone is an in-band system, and such architectures are often criticized for offering only limited throughput. When IBM unveiled SVC in May, it claimed that the system would deliver throughput of a very healthy 140,000 IOPS, outclassing the 80,000 IOPS claimed by HP for its competing CASA in-band virtualization system. Now, IBM is claiming SVC will deliver performance of up to 280,000 IOPS and up to 1.8GB per second of throughput and up to two petabytes of pooled storage.

SVC will run on IBM Linux Xseries Intel-powered appliances or servers, and will carry list prices starting at $60,000. A ready-integrated package called SAN Integration Server, comprising SVC, SAN switches and IBM FastT disk arrays, will carry a base configuration list price of $140,000.

SVC will only support IBM storage arrays when it first ships, and other vendors’ arrays will be supported in the fourth quarter. We’re not saying yet which ones. We’re working in parallel on products from major suppliers, said Clod Barrera, IBM’s director of systems strategy and architecture.

Getting that support won’t be crucial at first. An awful lot of customers will start using LodeStone with IBM arrays, but over time support for other vendors’ arrays will become more important, Barrera said.

Dennis Martin, analyst at the Evaluator Group said: By the time customers get around to using the IBM virtualization software with third party arrays, IBM will probably be supporting them.

IBM has not yet swapped API access to its storage arrays with as many other vendors as its rivals. Like EMC Corp and Hitachi Ltd, it has swapped APIs with Hewlett Packard Co. But while the latter two vendors have also swapped APIs with each other, IBM’s only swap beyond HP was a deal it announced with Hitachi in 2001 which involved only a limited trade of technology access. Yesterday the company repeated its usual comments that API swaps are only needed in the interim before the CIM and SMIS become sufficiently developed.

The updates to the Shark replication software were announced last month, and concern the snapshotting and mirroring functions for the disk array (CI 15 May 2003).

Source: Computerwire