StorageTek DASD history: STK originally got into the mainframe disk market in the late 70's/early 80's with SLEDs in 3330, 3350 and 3380 formats. In the late 80's, we began to get into array technology. STK has built three mainframe capable disk array units: Nordique, Viking/Arctic Fox (These were sold very briefly by IBM as the RSA/REA lines), and the infamous Iceberg/SVA (sold by IBM as RVA), which is still going strong today.
Nordique was a midrange RAID-5 device that emulated a 3990-2 non-cache controller. It was positioned as a lower cost alternative to Iceberg, and had the ability to be partitioned so that the backend SCSI drives could be directly attached to open systems. The model number was 9100. This unit was never sold by IBM. Viking/RAMAC Scalable Array(RSA) (IBM called it a 9396, but I honestly cannot remember the STK model number) was another RAID-5 subsystem that emulated 3990-3, had cache and faster/bigger drives than Nordique. The Arctic Fox/RAMAC Electronic Array was 'Solid State DASD". It showed up on some IBM marketing materials as the 9397 and had a few betas, but I don't believe was ever widely available. STK was in the process of developing the two parallel DASD lines (Iceberg and Viking/Arctic Fox) at the time that the deal was struck with IBM to sell STK DASD under IBM's name. IBM decided to concentrate on the RVA, thus the RSA/REA line was discontinued shortly after liftoff. The RVA went through several iterations, then then IBM declined to renew with STK in order to concentrate on Shark. STK went back to selling the Iceberg technology as SVA (Shared Virtual Array). We recently released PAV capability on the current model, which is called V2XF. If you saw good performance from a non-Iceberg STK array, it was not a Nordique. I guessing you had a rare and wonderful Viking unit. Those units were very fast for their day. Well, they were just plain fast. There were many disappointed engineers when the line was discontinued, but marketing makes the rules. Scott Ledbetter StorageTek -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ann Smith Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 7:19 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Z/800 IFL W/O VM using SANS and/or Oracle For what it's worth the STK devices we were using were VERY old. They dug up the old dasd for our linux/390 Proof of Concept. Since our POC last year we have finally migrated to newer hand me downs from the zOS folks. The devices we were on then are no longer supported by STK though they were some kind of 9393's. The point here is that performance on the old STK devices was better than the relatively new SAN. Plus we had the benefits of detailed stats on I/O from ESAMON. But the SAN is the corporate standard. Linux/390 can do both. David Andrews wrote: > On Tue, 2004-05-11 at 15:03, Stephen Frazier wrote: > > Over the years since there first pure RAID-5 box STK has made many > > incremental improvements. > > You must be thinking of something else. STK discontinued the Nordique > ("pure RAID-5 box") for ESCON a very long time ago. > > > The improvements have been in the areas of > > reliability by adding additional parity to the original RAID-5. The > > compression algorithms that they added have helped capacity. > > The compression feature is part of the Log-Structured-File (LSF) > system, and is not a bolt-on for RAID-5. LSF makes this and other > things possible, such as snapshot copy and virtual volumes. One of my > favorite little pluses is what the marketing guys call "self tuning" > -- you don't have to worry anymore about volume placement and hot > array drawers. The subsystem handles it. > > My point throughout is that LSF is a *very* different beast from one's > garden-variety RAID box, and that referring to STK DASD as "RAID-5" is > little more descriptive than saying it contains hard drives. > > -- > David Andrews > A. Duda and Sons, Inc. > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send > email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or > visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
