Tag: Mainframe

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Catching Up With Summer 2018 IBM Cloudy Software Defined Storage Announcements

Summer 2018 IBM Cloudy Software Defined Storage Announcements

Catching Up With Summer 2018 IBM Cloudy Software Defined Storage Announcements

Time for some catching up with summer 2018 IBM cloudy software defined storage announcements that were made earlier this week. The Share Event (Mainframe centric) is occurring this week in St. Louis. Thus, it is no surprise that it is time for catching up with summer 2018 IBM cloudy software-defined storage announcements that are geared to mainframe Z environments. These cloud and software-defined storage for the mainframe environment announcements follow those from a few weeks ago including new Power9 based servers and IBM FlashSystem 9100 flash SSD.

What was announced

What IBM announced this week were a mix of mainframe Z server storage with software-defined storage and cloud (e.g. cloudy) support including:

IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.6 multi-cloud updates with tiered backup across on-site and cloud. For example, active data remains on-site (or on-prem), inactive data protection copies get moved (tiered) to cloud storage. Other enhancements include software-defined threat protection such as malware and ransomware extending to hypervisor data, along with blueprint guides for IBM Cloud (e.g., Softlayer), AWS and Microsoft Azure.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus 10.1.1 enhanced with encryption of vSnap repositories for security, VMware vSphere 6.7 support, improved dashboards user interfaces (UI), and DB2 support in addition to Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

IBM DS8882F storage
IBM DS8882F Z mainframe rack mount storage Image via IBM.com

IBM DS8882F rack-mounted storage system (part of DS8000 storage family) integrated with IBM Z ZR1 (mainframe) and LinuxOne Rockhopper II (mainframe) servers. The DS8882F supports from 6.4TB to 368.64TB raw capacity. Along with safeguarded copy protection including read-only copies (e.g., a variation of WORM), along with encrypted digital signatures, and 256-bit AES encryption.

IBM Cloud Object Storage aka COS (formerly known as Cleversafe) functions as a target tier for DS8880 without the need for an external gateway. Enhancements also include a new 1U server (via Quanta) supporting up to 72 TB configurations.

IBM Elastic Storage Server File and Object pre-configured storage for AI, ML, Big Data and High-Performance Compute (HPC) includes an integrated file (NFS, SMB, S3, Swift) and object access. The solution is pre-installed on IBM Power8 servers running Red Hat Linux (e.g., RHEL). IBM claims high throughput for NAS NFS workloads with a large number of server connections. However, some performance numbers would be impressive to see along with a side of context.

IBM Spectrum Scale on AWS is a software-defined storage solution alternative to the traditional appliance-based solution. With Spectrum Scale 5.0.2 IBM is joining other vendors who have made their software-defined storage solutions available on clouds such as AWS, Azure, Google among others. Besides running on AWS working with Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), IBM supports per TB licenses including bringing your own license a growing industry trend.

Where to learn more

Learn more about IBM Server, Storage, Data Protection and data infrastructures related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Despite having been declared dead for decades, IBM Z series are still prevalent in many large environments even in a software-defined cloudy era. It’s good to see IBM continuing to invest in, and join other industry vendors who are supporting various cloudy deployments, as well as legacy on-site aka on-prem.

Likewise, IBM is making its legacy Z mainframe systems trendy and cloudy with these new enhancements to support customer hybrid server, storage, and data infrastructure deployments.

Overall, a nice set of incremental improvements following industry trends, and catching up with summer 2018 IBM cloudy software defined storage announcements.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Broadcom buying CA, Brilliant or a Brainbuster?

Broadcom buying CA, Brilliant or a Brainbuster?

Broadcom buying CA, Brilliant or a Brain buster?

For some in the IT industry as well as financial markets, there is skepticism about Broadcom (formerly known as Avago) making an announcing that they are buying CA Technologies (CA) for USD 18.9 Billion (cash). For example, the Broadcom stock ( AVGO) took a significant negative hit (13%) on the news.

Broadcom Stock impact after announcing CA purchase
Broadcom Stock upon announcing buying CA (via Google)

Broadcom aka Avago and CA rewind

Why the backlash over buying CA? a couple of reasons, CA is not exactly the most loved software vendor by customers in the industry, and, Broadcom (Avago) has been traditionally focused on hardware.

However, to understand this better, lets take a step back.

After digesting the likes of Broadcom, Brocade, and LSI among others, as well as after failing to capture Qualcomm in a USD 117 Billion takeover attempt, Avago (e.g., Broadcom) has set its sights on Mainframe and legacy enterprise software vendor Computer Technologies (CA) formerly known as Computer Associates. CA has about USD 4.2 Billion in annual revenue with about two-thirds tied to legacy IBM mainframe software, and the rest in other enterprise software. While not a growth segment, the IBM mainframe software business is a good annuity revenue and margin stream.

Data Infrastructures
Data Infrastructures support IT business applications

Broadcom had 2017 revenues of about USD 17.6 Billion made up of a diverse product set including data infrastructure hardware along with associated software spanning legacy to new and emerging cloud environments. Some of Broadcom technologies include server I/O devices such as PCIe, SAS, SATA and NVMe adapters, RAID controllers and chips, Fibre Channel, NVMe over Fabric (NVMeoF), Ethernet, switches and much more.
Broadcom and CA, Brainbuster or Brilliant?

This deal is a bit of a head-scratcher or brainbuster on the surface as Broadcom aka Avago has been primarily a hardware company (they do have a portfolio of drivers, management tools, monitoring and other software) and I can understand them wanting to get more into the software business.

Avago (excuse me, Broadcom) has had a focus on leaning out acquisitions to drive volume and integration across its portfolio, bringing value to its partners and customers. For its part, CA has been known where old (or new) software goes to die or retire garnering CA reputations as a software retirement home, or undertaker for technology. Refer to the Broadcom SEC filing for more information here.

On the other hand, CA has made a successful business wringing our value from existing software as opposed to substantial investment in new development; they do do some new development.

Perhaps this is the risk and reward that Avago sees, where similar to themselves of wringing out value from existing hardware, maybe they will do the same with CA, however, taking it to a new level. If that is the game, then once CA is bought by Broadcom, who will they pursue from a software acquisition target list similar to what Avago has done with hardware?

Where to learn more

Learn more about Broadcom (Avago), CA and data infrastructures related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

For now, Broadcom buying CA is a brainbuster, especially on the surface. However, there could be a brilliant move if Broadcom can leverage CA to do what it has done in the past. That is, similar to Avago buying various companies and leaning them out; CA has done similar with both boosting recurring revenues and increasing market footprint. Also, the combined companies can also leverage their reach into various partner ecosystems as keep in mind, hardware needs software, software needs hardware, and Broadcom is now a supplier of both.

It will be interesting to see how much Broadcom leans out CA, perhaps the lessons from buying Brocade might help as opposed to previous purchases. My point is that Brocade solutions are higher up the data infrastructure technology stack than traditional Broadcom, Avago, LSI components that require more direct customer-facing sales and marketing.

CA for its part also relies on direct customer-facing sales and marketing, however, is their room or opportunity for leaning things out?

Something else interesting to watch is how much Broadcom allows CA to operate on its own, vs. more under the direct Broadcom umbrella.

Then there is the question of to sustain growth, does Broadcom and CA go on additional shopping sprees for undervalued software companies and whom would those be? Perhaps some of the legacy big vendors such as Cisco, Dell Technologies, HPE, IBM, Oracle among others might be interested in selling off some under performing software.

On the other hand, perhaps there are some opportunities for Broadcom and CA to do some buy out deals with private equity firms?

Keep in mind that over the past few years, several software business units have been divested from the likes of the combined Dell and EMC, HPE among others.

For now, I’m sticking with Broadcom buying CA as a brainbuster, however, see some interesting scenarios in the future.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Backup, Big data, Big Data Protection, CMG & More with Tom Becchetti Podcast

server storage I/O trends

In this Server StorageIO podcast episode, I am joined by Tom Becchetti (@tbecchetti) for a Friday afternoon conversation recorded live at Meisters in Scandia Minnesota (thanks to the Meisters crew!).

Tom Becchetti

For those of you who may not know Tom, he has been in the IT, data center, data infrastructure, server and storage (as well as data protection) industry for many years (ok decades) as a customer and vendor in various roles. Not surprising our data infrastructure discussion involves server, software, storage, big data, backup, data protection, big data protection, CMG (Computer Measurement Group @mspcmg), copy data management, cloud, containers, fundamental tradecraft skills among other related topics.

Check out Tom on twitter @tbecchetti and @mspcmg as well as his new website www.storagegodfather.com. Listen to the podcast discussion here (42 minutes) as well as on iTunes.

Also available on 

Ok, nuff said for now…

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the spring 2017 release of his new book Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press).

Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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More on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

Here’s a link to a new StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective on the emerging “Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology”.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Mainframe, CMG, Virtualization, Storage and “Zombie Technologies”

In case you missed the news, IBM today announced a new mainframe the z10, yes, that’s right, the mother of all “Zombie Technologies” (and I say this with all due respect), you know, technologies that are declared dead yet are viable, working and still living thus purchasable. Some other examples of Zombie technologies include magnetic tape which was declared dead at least ten years ago if not longer yet continues to evolve, granted a bit slower and with fewer vendors, yet the technology is still economically viable when paired up with disk to disk based backup as an off-line (read no power required) medium for preserving idle and inactive archive data. Another example of a Zombie technology is the printer as you may recall we were supposed to be completely paperless by now, yeh right.

Then there is Fibre Channel which was declared still born over a decade ago yet shows plenty of signs of life in the form of 8GFC (8Gb Fibre Channel) and emerging FCoE even with iSCSI waging another assault to kill the FC beast. Even the venerable 50 year old magnetic disk drive has been declared a dead technology with the re-emergence of SSD in the form of DRAM and FLASH yet magnetic hard disk drives (HDD) continue to be manufactured and shipped in record numbers making it a member of the Zombie technology club, a club that has some pretty esteemed members and more on the way.

I forget how many decades ago it was now that the IBM mainframe was declared dead and granted we have seen the exodus of Hitachi, Amdahl, NEC and others from the active marketplace developing and selling IBM plug compatible mainframes (PCMs). However the venerable mainframe from IBM like the energizer bunny keeps ticking and finding new roles including leveraging its built-in logical partition (LPAR) capabilities to support virtual machines, something that has been available for at least a few decades to enable being leveraged as a consolidation platform of not only legacy zOS (aka revamped MVS) and zVM (not to be confused with VMware) as well native Linux.

Shifting gears a bit, last week I had the pleasure of key-noting at a local Computer Measurement Group (CMG) event, a group that I have been involved with presenting at their events around the world for over a decade. Last weeks theme at the CMG event was Is Storage and I/O Still Important in a Virtual World? If you are not familiar with the CMG folks and you have an interesting in servers, storage, I/O and networking along with performance, capacity planning and virtualization these are some people to get to know. Granted the organization has its roots back in the mainframe era and thus the organization is a gazillion years old, yet, younger than the mainframe however not by much. Over the past several years with the advent of lower cost hardware and the attitude of hardware is cheap, just throw more hardware at the problem has in part led to the decline of what CMG once was as an organization.

However, given the collective knowledge base and broad background, skills and areas of interest spanning servers, storage, I/O, networking, virtualization, hardware, software, mainframe and open systems among others, given the current focus on addressing IT data center power, cooling, floor space and associated ecological and economic related topics (see www.greendatastorage.com) CMG has an opportunity to revive itself even more so than it has over the past few years. That is, CMG assuming its leaders and members can recognize the opportunity can stand up to take a lead role in tying together the skills and knowledge to implement cross technology domain IT infrastructure resource management including working with facilities personal to insure adequate resources (servers, storage, networking, power, cooling and floor space) are available when and where needed moving forward not to mention help shape and guide the server, storage and networking industry groups and forums on applicable metrics and measurement usage. If you are not familiar with CMG, check them out, it’s a good group with a lot of good subject matter expertise to tap into.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved