Common Europe Congress 2019

For the average IBM i shop storage has been just that storage. The primary differences between Internal disk and SAN disk for years was the complexity of connection and the price of the solution. Until not long ago questions such as What else can it do?  were left unasked because the cost and complexity answers often put SAN storage out of reach.Changes to the cost and complexity equation have placed SANs within reach of most if not all IBM i customers. So if we ™ve got a SAN what can it do besides be storage? Glad you asked!SANs bring to us the ability to make a combinations of storage types appear as one. They have the ability built in to move data between tiers of disk from the slowest of the spinning rust to the fastest of the Solid state storage based on frequency of access and you, the admin, doesn ™t need to waste a moment doing it. SANs can encrypt your data at rest with no overhead to IBM i.SANs can create a copy of 20TB of data in just seconds, really! OK Not really but it looks like it did so effectively it did. That copy can now be used to perform a backup or to run reports at a point in time or as a training environment or a test environment. When you ™re done with it it goes away as fast as it was created, in a flash.SANs can replicate date near or far for use in disaster recovery or high availability environments.Higher end SANs can even front end other storage presenting that to IBM i or migrating data from one SAN to another.In this session we ™ll show how to make each of the above work and how each of these can be useful in your shop.Learning objectives:Understand how to encrypt data at rest.Understand how to set up easy tier to enable data movement betweenstorage tiers.Understand how to build, trigger, and reset a Flash copy.Understand how to build a replicated data set between Storwize SANsUnderstand how to use the command line on StorwizeUnderstand how to communicate and control a Storwize SAN from IBM i