SOSS in action

December 17th, 2008: This week Hitachi made a few announcements to increase performance for the USP V family. Monday we announced the general availability of a flash-based SSD drive option in the USP V and USP VM. While on Tuesday we announced the certification of the USP V and USP VM with the new High Performance FICON (zHPF) enhancements that was announced for the IBM z System.

As you know, flash-based SSDs rely on high-speed memory to store and retrieve data and are designed without any mechanical components, which provide an extremely fast and energy-efficient solution for heavy I/O workloads for high performance enterprise storage applications. HDS is offering this as an internal, high performance tier of storage that is supported by all the dynamic capabilities of the USP virtualization platform – dynamic provisioning, thin provisioning, and tiered storage – which can compliment and optimize the performance and cost of existing disk-based virtualized storage systems.

Why is this so great? While the SSD option is perfect for customers who require high performance for business-critical applications it is much more expensive than spinning disk. With the ability to thin provision the SSD, avoids the waste of allocated unused space as well as the ability to move data to lower cost tiers when high performance is no longer required helps to minimize the cost of this investment, while maximizing the performance benefit across existing assets.

Moving on, High Performance FICON involves architectural changes to the z/Architecture and the FICON interface architecture to reduce overhead and improve performance and RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability). IBM claims that zHPF can improve throughput through a single DS8000 port by 100%. Our certification with zHPF means that the USP V and USP VM are compatible with ESCON, FICON, FCP and zHPF connectivity on select configurations of IBM System z10, zSeries 990, 890, 900 and 800 running operating systems including z/OS V1.9, z/VM V5.3, z/VSE V4.1 and Linux on System z Novell SUSE SLES 9 and SLES 10. See the Qualification letter which was issued by IBM here.

Many businesses still rely on mainframes for their most performance critical applications. The combination of zHPF channels with flash-based SSDs can provide a major improvement in this environment.
SSD drives will provide the most improvement for intensive random read requests in open or mainframe workloads.

With our Services Oriented Storage Solutions strategy, we are able to leverage these new announcements with existing services to further reduce cost, complexity, and risk for open and mainframe storage requirements.

To get more information, visit: www.hds.com/corporate/webfeeds