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DS8000 - anyone have one?
- Thread starter grshpr
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We are looking at purchasing a DS8300 with 1 expansion frame, and attaching Windows, AIX and VMWare servers to it. I'm looking for some real world experiences with it. Our IBM rep has been slow getting the reference calls for us, and the ones we have had are either Mainframe or AIX only shops.
We currently have an EVA5000, with about 20 Windows servers, 10 VMWare ESX servers (50 virutals) and 8 AIX servers that we are thinking of moving to a bigger box. The reason for the DS8300 will be the ability to also attach in an iSeries to this as well (currently over 600 SSA disks attached to that guy).
How is your DS8000 for managability? Are you using traditional LUN configuration, each server has it's own disks, or are you running one (of a few) bid disk pools, with several luns carved out? Our EVA does a great job of managing the data on the disks for us and we have not had any performance issues, and have been told that the DS8x00 can be configured in the same method and managed just as easily as the EVA.
Just looking for some real world experiences with one before we invest a ton of money.
We currently have an EVA5000, with about 20 Windows servers, 10 VMWare ESX servers (50 virutals) and 8 AIX servers that we are thinking of moving to a bigger box. The reason for the DS8300 will be the ability to also attach in an iSeries to this as well (currently over 600 SSA disks attached to that guy).
How is your DS8000 for managability? Are you using traditional LUN configuration, each server has it's own disks, or are you running one (of a few) bid disk pools, with several luns carved out? Our EVA does a great job of managing the data on the disks for us and we have not had any performance issues, and have been told that the DS8x00 can be configured in the same method and managed just as easily as the EVA.
Just looking for some real world experiences with one before we invest a ton of money.
The DS8000 has the flexibility to create and delete luns easily from a "pool" of available space. There is extra layer of virtualization above the RAID ranks. In essence, ranks are chopped up into "extents" and assigned to an "extent pool". Each pool can then be carved up into luns using the extents from across the pool and therefore, across different ranks.
It's beyond the scope of this forum to explain all the details. If you'd like a better explanation, Chapter 5 of this Redbook does a pretty good job explaining it:
There is both a GUI and a CLI configuration tool to configure the DS8000 as well as setup up the various copy services for backup and disaster recovery situations.
I can't speak for VMWare. I do know the DS8000 does well with mixed Open Systems enviroments with host attachments such as pSeries (AIX and Linux), iSeries, zSeries (including zLinux), HP, Sun, and Windows, often on a mixed fibre channel port i.e. Windows, AIX, and iSeries can be zoned into the same DS8000 fibre channel port. -- JT
It's beyond the scope of this forum to explain all the details. If you'd like a better explanation, Chapter 5 of this Redbook does a pretty good job explaining it:
There is both a GUI and a CLI configuration tool to configure the DS8000 as well as setup up the various copy services for backup and disaster recovery situations.
I can't speak for VMWare. I do know the DS8000 does well with mixed Open Systems enviroments with host attachments such as pSeries (AIX and Linux), iSeries, zSeries (including zLinux), HP, Sun, and Windows, often on a mixed fibre channel port i.e. Windows, AIX, and iSeries can be zoned into the same DS8000 fibre channel port. -- JT
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Thanks for all the feedback. We ended up purchasing a DS8300, and so far so good. We had some rough times with the initial load, but since then things seem to be going pretty well.
In our case though, we purchased the 8000 for 1 reason...
1. The ability to attach iSeries and Open Systems servers to the same physical disks
I would agree that the mass majority of windows data probably should not go on a DS8000, but some of our windows systems are mission critical, and about 85% of our data falls into this area. I personally would have rather seen us get a couple of EVA 8000's, but because of the requirement that we had we chose the 8000.
In our case though, we purchased the 8000 for 1 reason...
1. The ability to attach iSeries and Open Systems servers to the same physical disks
I would agree that the mass majority of windows data probably should not go on a DS8000, but some of our windows systems are mission critical, and about 85% of our data falls into this area. I personally would have rather seen us get a couple of EVA 8000's, but because of the requirement that we had we chose the 8000.
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