[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Stephen Hoffman wrote 2012-10-03 15:44:
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> IBM offers flash-based SSD caches in their XIV, and
> probably in the DS8000 storage controllers.

We are currently moving VMS storage at a customer site to an
all-DS8000 solution. This summer this site upgraded (or rather
replaced) their DS8000 with a newer modell. When I talked to the
DS8000 manager and got our 24 and 48 GB discs configured, he said
that they was so small that he had thought of putting them 100 %
on the SSD part of the DS8000. But we decided that that was
not needed, we get enought I/O anyway using old-style disk.
We get something like 2.000 I/O per sec when hammering on one
of the allocated disks. 4-5 time more then the old HSZ/HSG
controllers.

I also copied the VMS084 ISO image onto one extra spare
SAN disk on the DS8000, and by booting from that one I could
run a remote 8.3 -> 8.4 upgrade without any manual work
on-site (loading physical CD's or whatever).

All DS8000 volumes are visible from all three identical DS20e's
so any physical server can take any role (dev/test/prod) simply
by selecting the proper boot disk. If the prod system goes down,
we can shutdown "test" and reboot from the "prod" system disk and
we are running again. All consolse are also remotely accessable
so this can be done anyware where I have my laptop with me.

Pretty OK for a bunch of old DS20e 666 Mhz boxes.

I was at the site yesterday, and they are investing in changes
to the applications now, I will probably have full time with
application changes 6-9 month from now.

This VMS environment i alive.

Jan-Erik.