Spectrum Virtualize 8.1 - Whats New?

Today IBM announced Spectrum Virtualize 8.1 with some exciting enhancements to the code including cache and encryption enhancements, an updated GUI, remote support assistance, health checker and more.

The biggest headliner in the release is undoubtedly the cache enhancements.

Why? Because of the performance improvements these enhancements deliver.

Prior to this release the SVC memory manager (PLMM) could only address 64GB of memory. In this release the PLMM has been rewritten, structure sizes have been increased enabling more memory to be addressed via the cache if available. There are no visible changes apart from larger read cache sizes and therefore improved performance.
The V7000 Gen2+ will support up to 128GB per canister (256GB per system) the SVC SV1 and V9000 have had the capability of supporting 256GB per node since v7.8.1, the v8 operating system will now allow the cache to fully take advantage of all this lovely memory to improve performance and ultimately improve the end-users experience.

Security is a key function of Spectrum Virtualize that went under the microscope via IBM development and has had some serious improvements in the 8.1 release.
The 7.8 release introduced support for encryption key servers with Spectrum Virtualize via IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager (SKLM). The first release only allowed 1 key server. With the 8.1 server support has been added to up to 4 SKLM key server end points meaning 1 master and up to 3 clones are allowed. The benefit being each key server provides redundant/highly available access ot the system encryption keys. Also concurrent use of both SKLM servers and USB-based encryption is now supported enabling a deeply secure storage solution using USB for DR and key servers for day to day use.