Updated March 2019 - See Appendix B: IBM FlashSystem V9000 FlashCore Forever The success or failure of businesses often depends on how well organizations use their data assets for competitive advantage. Deeper insights from data require better information technology. As organizations modernize their IT infrastructure to boost innovation rather than limit it, they need a data storage system that can keep pace with several areas that affect your business: Highly virtualized environments Cloud computing Mobile and social systems of engagement In-depth, real-time analytics Making the correct decision on storage investment is critical. Organizations must have enough storage performance and agility to innovate when they need to implement cloud-based IT services, deploy virtual desktop infrastructure, enhance fraud detection, and use new analytics capabilities. At the same time, future storage investments must lower IT infrastructure costs while helping organizations to derive the greatest possible value from their data assets. The IBM® FlashSystem V9000 is the premier, fully integrated, Tier 1, all-flash offering from IBM. It has changed the economics of today's data center by eliminating storage bottlenecks. Its software-defined storage features simplify data management, improve data security, and preserve your investments in storage. The IBM FlashSystem® V9000 SAS expansion enclosures provide new tiering options with read-intensive SSDs or nearline SAS HDDs. IBM FlashSystem V9000 includes IBM FlashCore® technology and advanced software-defined storage available in one solution in a compact 6U form factor. IBM FlashSystem V9000 improves business application availability. It delivers greater resource utilization so you can get the most from your storage resources, and achieve a simpler, more scalable, and cost-efficient IT Infrastructure. This IBM Redbooks® publication provides information about IBM FlashSystem V9000 Software V8.1. It describes the core product architecture, software, hardware, and implementation, and provides hints and tips. The underlying basic hardware and software architecture and features of the IBM FlashSystem V9000 AC3 control enclosure and on IBM Spectrum Virtualize 8.1 software are described in these publications: Implementing IBM FlashSystem 900 Model AE3, SG24-8414 Implementing the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller V7.4, SG24-7933 Using IBM FlashSystem V9000 software functions, management tools, and interoperability combines the performance of IBM FlashSystem architecture with the advanced functions of software-defined storage to deliver performance, efficiency, and functions that meet the needs of enterprise workloads that demand IBM MicroLatency® response time. This book offers IBM FlashSystem V9000 scalability concepts and guidelines for planning, installing, and configuring, which can help environments scale up and out to add more flash capacity and expand virtualized systems. Port utilization methodologies are provided to help you maximize the full potential of IBM FlashSystem V9000 performance and low latency in your scalable environment. This book is intended for pre-sales and post-sales technical support professionals, storage administrators, and anyone who wants to understand how to implement this exciting technology.

IBM® FlashSystem 9100 combines the performance of flash and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) with the reliability and innovation of IBM FlashCore® technology and the rich features of IBM SpectrumTM Virtualize — all in a powerful 2U storage system. Providing intensive data driven multi-cloud storage capacity, FlashSystem 9100 is deeply integrated with the software-defined capabilities of IBM Spectrum StorageTM, which allows you to easily add the multi-cloud solutions that best support your business. In this IBM Redbooks® publication, we discuss the product's features and planning steps, architecture, installation, configuration, and hints and tips.

This IBM® RedpaperTM publication describes best practices for deploying IBM FlashSystemTM V9000 enterprise storage system in a VMware vSphere environment. It includes guidelines and examples of the latest FlashSystem V9000 hardware and software, integrated with VMware version 6, to demonstrate the business benefits these solutions. Topics illustrate planning, configuring, operations, and preferred practices that include integration of FlashSystem V9000 with the VMware vCloud suite of applications: vCenter Web Client (VWC) vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM/SRA) The authors also describe how to deploy a cloud-based solution with FlashSystem V9000 in an environment with VMware and IBM SpectrumTM Control Base Edition 2.1.1. This paper is intended for presales consulting engineers, sales engineers, and IBM clients who want to deploy IBM FlashSystem V9000 in virtualized data centers that are based on VMware vSphere.

Today, new business models in the marketplace coexist with traditional ones and their well-established IT architectures. They generate new business needs and new IT requirements that can only be satisfied by new service models and new technological approaches. These changes are reshaping traditional IT concepts. Cloud in its three main variants (Public, Hybrid, and Private) represents the major and most viable answer to those IT requirements, and software-defined infrastructure (SDI) is its major technological enabler. IBM® technology, with its rich and complete set of storage hardware and software products, supports SDI both in an open standard framework and in other vendors' environments. IBM services are able to deliver solutions to the customers with their extensive knowledge of the topic and the experiences gained in partnership with clients. This IBM RedpaperTM publication focuses on software-defined storage (SDS) and IBM Storage Systems product offerings for software-defined environments (SDEs). It also provides use case examples across various industries that cover different client needs, proposed solutions, and results. This paper can help you to understand current organizational capabilities and challenges, and to identify specific business objectives to be achieved by implementing an SDS solution in your enterprise.

IBM® Spectrum Virtualize and VMware's Virtual Volumes (VVols) are paving the way toward a true IBM Software Defined Environment (SDE). IBM SpectrumTM Virtualize is at the core of software-defined storage. The addition of VVols enables a fundamentally more efficient operational model for storage in virtualized environments, centering it around the virtual machine (VM) rather than the physical infrastructure. This IBM Redbooks® publication provides an overview of the VVols management framework and its implementation on storage systems managed by IBM Spectrum VirtualizeTM..

Today's global organizations depend on being able to unlock business insights from massive volumes of data. Now, with IBM® FlashSystem 900, powered by IBM FlashCoreTM technology, they can make faster decisions based on real-time insights and unleash the power of the most demanding applications, including online transaction processing (OLTP) and analytics databases, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), technical computing applications, and cloud environments. This IBM Redbooks® publication introduces clients to the IBM FlashSystem® 900. It provides in-depth knowledge of the product architecture, software and hardware, implementation, and hints and tips. Also illustrated are use cases that show real-world solutions for tiering, flash-only, and preferred-read, and also examples of the benefits gained by integrating the FlashSystem storage into business environments. This book is intended for pre-sales and post-sales technical support professionals and storage administrators, and for anyone who wants to understand how to implement this new and exciting technology. This book describes the following offerings of the IBM SpectrumTM Storage family: IBM Spectrum StorageTM IBM Spectrum ControlTM IBM Spectrum VirtualizeTM IBM Spectrum ScaleTM IBM Spectrum AccelerateTM

Today's global organizations depend on being able to unlock business insights from massive volumes of data. Now, with IBM® FlashSystem 900 Model AE3 that is powered by IBM FlashCore® technology, they can make faster decisions that are based on real-time insights. They also can unleash the power of the most demanding applications, including online transaction processing (OLTP) and analytics databases, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), technical computing applications, and cloud environments. This IBM Redbooks® publication introduces clients to the IBM FlashSystem® 900 Model AE3. It provides in-depth knowledge of the product architecture, software and hardware, implementation, and hints and tips. Also presented are use cases that show real-world solutions for tiering, flash-only, and preferred-read. Examples of the benefits that are gained by integrating the FlashSystem storage into business environments also are described. This book is intended for pre-sales and post-sales technical support professionals and storage administrators, and anyone who wants to understand how to implement this new and exciting technology.

IBM® Storwize® HyperSwap® is a response to increasing demand for continuous application availability, minimizing downtime in the event of an outage, and non disruptive migrations. IT centers with IBM i can take full advantage of the HyperSwap solution. In this IBM RedpaperTM publication, we provide instructions to implement Storwize HyperSwap with IBM i. We also describe some business continuity scenarios in this area, including solutions with HyperSwap and IBM i Live Partition Mobility, and a solution with HyperSwap and IBM PowerHA® for IBM i.

Continuing its commitment to developing and delivering industry-leading storage technologies, IBM® introduces Data Reduction Pools (DRP) and Deduplication powered by IBM SpectrumTM Virtualize, which are innovative storage features that deliver essential storage efficiency technologies and exceptional ease of use and performance, all integrated into a proven design. This book discusses Data Reduction Pools (DRP) and Deduplication and is intended for experienced storage administrators who are fully familiar with IBM Spectrum Virtualize, SAN Volume Controller, and the Storwize family of products.

IBM® Spectrum Virtualize Software Version 7.8 provides software-defined storage capabilities across various platforms, including IBM SAN Volume Controller, IBM Storwize® V7000, Storwize V7000 (Unified), Storwize V5000, Storwize V3700, and Storwize V3500. These offerings help clients reduce the complexities and cost of managing their storage in the following ways: Centralizing management of storage volumes to enable administrators to manage storage volumes from a single point Improving utilization of storage capacity with virtual volumes to enable businesses to tap into previously unused disk capacity Avoiding downtime for backups, maintenance, and upgrades Performing data migration without disruption to applications Enabling all storage devices to be organized into storage pools from which virtual volumes, whether standard, compressed, or thin-provisioned, are created with the characteristics that you want Delivering automation of storage management with SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center, IBM Tivoli® Storage Productivity Center (as applicable by platform), and IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy® Manager (as applicable by platform) Increasing the performance efficiency of storage pools with IBM Easy Tier® Restoring data access quickly with near and remote copy capabilities across Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and IP networks In this IBM Redbooks® publication, which is aimed at storage administrators and technical professionals, we describe the IBM HyperSwap® capability in IBM SpectrumTM Virtualize Software V7.8. HyperSwap delivers high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) in one solution and reuses capital investments to achieve a range of recovery and management options that are transparent to host operations. This book describes how you can use HyperSwap with VMware to create an environment that can withstand robust workloads.