IBM has replaced its five Storwize V5000 arrays with four faster, bigger and cheaper models.
The V5000 and V7000 products are classic dual-controller storage arrays which use IBMs Spectrum Virtualise software to provide a pool of SAN (block access) storage. They come in a 2U x 24 2.5-inch slot base chassis.
The old and new model ranges look like this;
As you can see the V5000E and V5100 replaces the original V5000 line. The table below shows the feature spec of old and new.
The V5010E, with E indicating Extended, replaces the V5010 and V5020. The V5030E replaces the V5030 and all-flash V5030F.
A new V5100 line which pushes the V5000E range closer to the high-end V7000s. It looks like this:
These have considerably more cache memory than the V5000Es and can support NVMe drives and NVMe over Fibre Channel to provide low-latency and fast access to data. IBM said the V5100s are ready for storage-class memory and 32Gbit/s Fibre Channel.
The V5100s can have two nodes in a cluster while the V7000s can cluster up to four nodes together. If you can bear looking at another table here is one showing some of their features:
Update: Blocks & Files was told by Eric Herzog that; ” The Storwize V7000 Gen3 introduced in October ’18 was also updated, along with the new Storwize 5000/5100 family announced 2 April, with the same 30.72TB SSDs, the 14TB HDDs, the 25Gbit/s Ethernet and the 32Gbit/s FC.”
Storwize management
All the Storwize arrays are managed through IBM’s Storage Insights, a cloud-based management and support tool, which provides analytics and automation.
Bullet points from IBM’s Storwize update briefing deck:
- V5010E has 4x more cache than the V5010, 2x its IOPS, and scales to 12PB maximum flash capacity.
- V5010E is 30 per cent cheaper than the V5010 and can be upgraded to the V5030E.
- V5030E has compression and deduplication. It scales to 23PB of all-flash storage in a single system; 32PB with 2-way clustering.
- V5030E has a 30 per cent lower street price than the V5030 and 20 per cent more IOPS.
- V5100s can have 2PB of flash in a 2U chassis, and scale out like the V5030F; 23PB in a single system or 32PB with 2-way clustering.
- V5100s have 9x more cache than the V5030, and pump out 2.4x more IOPS than the V5030F (with data reduction), while costing 10 per cent more.
All-in-all, the refreshed V5000E and V5100s, and updated V7000s go faster than the previous models, store more data and enable users to get at it faster for less cost.
