How many Shared Storage Pools in the world?

In the recent IBM Edge 2015 Technical University conference, I had over 160 people join my sessions on SSP. This shows considerable interest on the new features and what is coming next.   The release later in the year has a LARGE new feature that we have been waiting for and a bunch of smaller ones that are useful and increase usability - but I can't say more without a Non Disclosure Agreement :-)    Just want you to know there is lots more on the way.

The Q1 2015 new feature is the DR recovery wholesale of the SSP to a remote data centre, if you have a total site loss.  Takes about 40 minute to describe and 4 minutes to do.  Typical SSP feature big on concepts but simple to operate.

But the point of this blog entry is that I get asked repeatedly: How many users have SSP in production and non-production use?

I am always clear that SSP is production ready but if you have well established virtual machines and practice for the core large production RDBMS, App Servers and website that use other disk technology then stick to what you know. SSP could do it unless you are tuning to the last 3% but it makes sense for SSP to first be used to sweep up all the smaller less critical workloads and reduce man-power there first.

Problem is, we can't tell and SSP is free with your VIOS so we can't track SSP sales.  No one phones up IBM and says how delighted they are with SSP (or any other feature).

I get on average 4 emails a week for customers about to try SSP and want to check what they are doing is sane and their plans are about right.

So pure guesswork 52 weeks a year (me being on holiday does not stop the email), SSP has been out and updated every year for 5 years but lets count 4 years.

That makes if about 800 Power Systems users trying out SSP - once you break the mental barrier and start one you realise how simple they are to operate and the time saved and you will not be going back to vSCSI LUNs or the man-power intensive NPIV (if you have watched one of my sessions at a Technical University you will have heard my jokes about how NPIV might have 2 - 3% performance but at a high-cost people cost and LPM is often MUCH harder in practice).

Then, more guesses

• 1 in 10 users email me a question (probably 1 in a hundred but let us err on the low side)
• Each user has 4 SSP (2 in serious use, 1 test and the next version)

Guesstimate in 2015: ~32,000 Shared Storage Pools out there.

Guesstimate in 2020: would be double this number of  Shared Storage Pools out there.

What have I got ?  I have four SSP cluster/pools

1. Globular/Pacific - Stable, important to me data, internal ATS website and running for 4 years and upgraded across all the versions.  Size = 8 VIOS and 3 TB size with mirrored (failgrp) across two V7000.
2. Stellar/Arctic - PowerVC demo across 5 identical small machines. Size 1 TB and mirrored
3. Spiral/Spiral - Crash and burn for new beta version of VIOS for the next release (see above).
4. Disaster  Recovery testing remote copy of Stellar  - Logically remote, its actually about 2 feet away on a different V7000, different POWER7+ machine and different HMC :-)