IBM pushes the Accelerate, makes one Big Blue storage family

Much ado in Big Blue land today; it is making XIV available as Spectrum Accelerate software-defined storage, while also rebranding GPFS as Spectrum Scale in Linux mainframe environments. There's also a Spectrum Storage family coming. Based on IBM website information we've seen it looks as if the giant is developing its …

[Bob Wheeler]

In the video

Was it my ears, or did the guy on the video sound like he had a lisp?

I kept thinking that Elmer Fudd was doing the voice over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: In the video

I believe that it is Sir Prancelot that did the voiceover now that there are no crusades to attend.

[cloud10]

IBM PR on Spectrum Storage/the new Spectrum Accelerate

The link to the press release is working now. Warmly invite you to have a look-see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: IBM PR on Spectrum Storage/the new Spectrum Accelerate

I warmly invite you to get links working a nano-second or two before any announcement such as this. Basics, my lad, basics.

[Yes Me]

Long-Names-With-Silly-Components-itis

"GPFS was recently rebranded to Elastic Storage. Why is IBM rebranding it again as Spectrum Scale?"

Because some years ago IBM Marketing became infected with Long Name disease, a condition in which the patient believes that long names with silly component words make fools buy stuff that they didn't buy with accurate, descriptive names like "General Parallel File System".

It's an unfortunate form of mental illness, because the more evidence there is that it doesn't work, the more the patient makes the names longer and sillier.

[WhizzKidd]

Re: Long-Names-With-Silly-Components-itis

Sorry but it is more to do with legal reasons. When IBM announced the renaming of the product, it was to "Project Elastic Cloud", as IBM does not have the rights to the name "Elastic Cloud". This was a working title awaiting the announcement of the family name.

[Yes Me]

Re: Long-Names-With-Silly-Components-itis

Oh come on. I wasn't sneering at the need to avoid other people's trademarks. I was sneering at the pathetic belief that renaming something is going to influence rational purchasing decisions. This nonsense has been going on for years in the distributed storage area (and I mean 20 years at least). Even "GPFS" was a rebranding originally (late 1990s). Lipstick on a pig is really the correct metaphor, because IBM has never, ever got this area right, back to AFS/DFS. Remember the Storage Tank fiasco? Or should I call it IBM TotalStorage SAN File System?

The problem has always been the products, never the names.

[Joseph Haig]

Re: Long-Names-With-Silly-Components-itis

"... the pathetic belief that renaming something is going to influence rational purchasing decisions."

Maybe they are going after the irrational purchasing decisions.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17

[Man Mountain]

Bearing in mind how average the XIV performance is when it's on very specific, tuned hardware, I can't imagine it working that well on any old server as SDS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't they need dedicated UPS protection also ? From what I remember there's no NVRAM on XIV so cache needs to be held up by dedicated UPS until the nodes can stage RAM to disk (a bit like XtremIO). Obviously in such a design tight integration is critical to provide the correct timings to ensure data integrity, which in turn makes this all sound a bit cumbersome as an SDS play.