Christmas in May? A flurry of new features released today!

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May 9^th has been a target on my calendar for some time now.  Inside of IBM, we have been waiting for this day to come so we could talk about the new things being released in the storage platform.  It almost feels like Christmas morning with a bunch of new presents under the tree.  Each gift has inside something that is either really cool or something very useful.  The only difference is your Aunt Matilda and her little dog is not coming over for brunch.

Under the IBM tree today is a slew of presents for almost the entire storage platform.  I will concentrate on just the IBM NAS ones but if you are interested in knowing what is going on elsewhere, you can find more information at the main website.

SONAS must have been a good boy because there are plenty of gifts for him under the tree this morning.  Not only did he find presents under the tree but there were a few little things in his stocking.  Here is what Santa brought:

1. A hardware update on the X3650 nodes.  Just like before, the SONAS system uses the impressive workhorse but now it uses the more powerful M3 class with a six core Xeon Intel 2.66GHz processor.  It has 24GB of DDR3 RAM with the option to increase to a total of 144 GB of DDR3 RAM per interface node.  Also new with the X3650 is the option to include a second processor to double the amount of cores to 12 total per interface node.  
2. Next under the tree is new support for not only XiV but now SONAS supports the SVC and V7000 as disk subsystems.  This is a huge gift because now SONAS can support tons of other storage under the awesome virtualization of the SVC code.  V7000 support is also interesting as that platform has the virtualization code from SVC but also support its own drive architecture including solid state drives. 
3. In the same category of sweaters, SONAS gets a little smaller rack extender.  In the past IBM has used a 16 inch extender in order to accommodate the large 60 drive disk enclosure.   That has now been trimmed down to only 8 inches and 0 for the gateway model and RXC rack that houses only interface nodes.  
4. SONAS gets a new file system upgrade to GPFS 3.4 PTF4.  This will provide a significant performance improvement over the R1.1.1x release.  The updated file system handles small file and random I/O a lot more efficiently.  With this update we now use the role of manager nodes instead of interface nodes to gain more flexibility in how we track data in cache.  
5. Other gifts SONAS received were new support for NDMP, Anti-virus support, use of both 10GbE ports on the same CNA and some power updates for the EU countries.  And along with all of that, there is a new performance monitoring package called Perfcol that collects more information for analysis.

This SONAS release is labeled R1.2 and can be obtained by contacting the technical advisor assigned to you. 

Santa was also at the N series house and dropped off a few gifts.  A new N6270 to replace the N6070.  This new system is in line with the N6200 series with larger amounts of RAM and processors.  Just like the smaller N6240, there is an expansion controller where customers can add more PCI control cards like HBAs, 10GbE or even FCoE.  A new disk shelf was also released which uses the smaller 2.5 inch drives with improved back end performance. 

And over at the Real Time Compression house they got new support for EMC Celerra. 

Over all a very busy time of year for IBM (and Santa) as these were just a fraction of the Storage announcements today.  Also today is the IBM Storage Executive Summit in New York City.  My friend and fellow blogger Tony Pearson is covering this great event and will be updating his blog and twitter feed.  If you were not able to make it to NYC for the event, feel free to tweet him your questions @az990tony  You can also send questions to our IBM Storage feed at @ibmstorage