IBM Spectrum Virtualize software capabilities are offered across a variety of platforms, including SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Storwize V7000 (Unified), Storwize V5000, Storwize V3700, Storwize V3500, and FlashSystem V9000.

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• Safeguarded Copy provides secure, immutable snapshots
• Support for 15,000 volumes (on platforms that previously supported 10,000 volumes)
• Volume Mobility (non-disruptively move volumes between systems)
• Increased Remote Copy bitmap capacity for FS7200, FS9200, SAN Volume Controller SA2 and SV2
• Support for expanding the size of a volume that has FlashCopy mappings
• Multiple IP addresses (and VLANs) per physical Ethernet port
• Multiple IP replication partnerships
• GUI support for drive firmware update test utility

• Address cyber threats with Safeguarded Copy
• Immutable, isolated copies acting as logical air gap (up to 15 000 point in time)
• Separate privileges for admins of production data and Safeguarded Copies
• Early threat detection with activity, patterns and operations monitoring
• Quick recovery to minimize impact
• DataReduction Pool performances enhancement

• Provisioning Policies - define volume properties in advance
• System-wide DNS
• Record opt-in for data sharing
• Increased synchronisation rate for mirrored volumes
• Increased timeout for RESTful API authentication
• Support for CipherTrust Manager

• DRAID 1
• Support for 3-Site Orchestrator in remote-copy and HyperSwap configurations
• Up to 12 SCM drives now supported
• DRP Child Pools
• Monitor (least privileged) role added

• VMware support for FC-NVMe
• Monitor role available for data collection by Spectrum Control v5.3.7 or later

• DRAID Expansion
• HyperSwap Volume Expansion
• Support for FlashSystem 7200 and 9200 systems
• Support for SVC models SV2 and SA2
• Support for FCM Next-Gen XL
• Support for Storage Class Memory drives
• Support for SNMP v3
• Enhanced Volume Protection (enabled by default)
• Enhanced audit log
• STAT Tool in GUI
• Secure Erase
• Data Reduction Pool performance enhancements
• Data Reduction Pool support for IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud
• Four-node support for Amazon Web Services-based (AWS) IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud
• Support for software-based compression on AWS

• Multi-tenancy capability with Object-Based Access Control
• Support for AWS in Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud
• Support for Storwize V5100 systems
• Support for 4-port 32Gb FC adapters
• Improvements to Data Reduction Pools performance
• Improvements to IP Quorum
• Improvements to Local HyperSwap
• Improved Out of Space Handling
• Improvements to host status presentation in CLI to better indicate redundancy of host-volume connectivity
• Removal of support for DSA-based host key algorithms when using SSH login

• NVMe over Fibre Channel support on 16 Gb Fibre Channel adapters
• Full IP-based quorum
• 64K host mappings
• IBM Spectrum™ Insights call home transport protocol
• Single copy vdisk expand with format
• iSER support for host attachment with 25 GbE adapters (IBM SVC Model SV1 and IBM Storwize V9000 Model AC3)
• Clustering support over Ethernet using remote direct memory access (RDMA)

• Support for deduplicated volumes
• RESTful API support
• Enhanced Call Home

• Data Reduction Pools (new pool with deduplication)
• Data reduction pools also support server environments that use the SCSI UNMAP command. This command is used by software to indicate storage capacity that it is no longer using. Data reduction pools release this capacity and return it to the available capacity pool.
• 25GbE iSCSI Host Support - A new dual port NIC card with native 25GbE ports for iSCSI. Available for all the current generation Virtualize products only.
• NVMe - Hardware ready-ness statements. The new 25GbE and existing 16Gb FC adapters are both NVMe-oF capable, and Statements of Direction were made that this will be available in a subsequent software update.
• Support for using compression on all volumes in a system (up to 10,000 per system)

• Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud
• Thin-Provisioned Mdisks
• Port Grouping and Scalability for iSCSI
• Allow username for iSCSI host attach authentication
• Support for 25G iSCSI ports (8.1.1.1)

• Remote Support Assistance (RSA) provides secure connection for remote support with audit logging
• Increased memory support for the controllers to improve performance (256 GB support per SVC node and 128 GB per V7000 Gen2+ canister)
• SVC hot spare node support with hot upgrade capability
• Updated GUI look and feel
• IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager (SKLM) coexistence with USB encryption key management and SKLM clone server support
• Pause capability in concurrent code upgrade (CCU) enables flexibility during code upgrades
• Health Checker provides customised, rules-based configuration recommendations
• Spectrum Virtualize systems can now upload snaps directly to IBM, if appropriate network firewall rules are configured (Note: Blue Diamond support for this feature is not yet available)
• Removes support for first generation platforms - V3500-2071, V3700-2072, V5000-2077/8, V7000-2076, V840-9846/8-AC0 (CG8) and SVC CF8 & CG8

• Host cluster I/O throttling: I/O throttling can be managed at the host level (individual or groups) and at managed disk levels for improved performance management.
• Host groups with GUI support: Host groups can be more easily managed through the GUI, adding more management flexibility to existing CLI support.
• Increased background FlashCopy transfer rates up to 2GB/s (before 64MB/s): This feature enables you to increase the rate of background FlashCopy transfers, providing faster copies as the infrastructure allows. This takes advantage of the higher performance capabilities of today's systems, processing the copy in a shorter period of time.
• Port Congestion Statistic: Zero buffer credits help detect SAN congestion in performance-related issues, improving support in high-performance environments.
• Resizing of volumes in remote mirror relationships: Target volumes in remote mirror relationships will be automatically resized when source volumes are resized.
• Consistency protection for Metro/Global Mirror relationships: An automatic restart of mirroring relationships after a link fails between the mirror sites improves disaster recovery scenarios, helping to ensure the applications are protected throughout the process.
• Host multi-pathing drivers will be instructed to fail-over to the alternate node, before a node goes down for upgrade, to enhance multi-pathing failover behaviour

• More flexible data protection with transparent cloud tiering to leverage the cloud as snapshot targets and restore snapshots from the cloud
• Improved data economics through advanced functionalities for lower endurance flash drives, support multi-Tier Storage Pools with Tier 1 Flash Drives (previously known as Read Intensive drives)
• Improved security with support for encryption key management software, support for IBM SKLM Encryption Key Manager
• EasyTier Warm Promote will notice data in a Nearline tier that becomes hot within 5 minutes
• Scalability with support for high-density expansion enclosures
• Due to memory constraints, Storwize V7000 Gen1 control enclosures with one or more compressed volumes cannot be upgraded to V7.8.0.0 or later.
• Ability to non-disruptively upgrade V5010/V5020 systems to V5020/V5030
• Ability to non-disruptively upgrade V7000 Gen 2 systems to V7000 Gen 2+

• Manageability with CLI support for host groups
• Scalability with support for up to 10,000 virtual disks, depending on the model; and up to 20 Expansion Enclosures on SVC DH8 and SV1 models and on FlashSystems V9000
• Reliability, availability, and serviceability with DRAID Component in Doubt (CID) and support for read-intensive flash drives
• Performance with DRAID multi-threading
• Flexibility with iSCSI virtualization support for XIV Gen 3, Spectrum Accelerate, FlashSystems A9000 and FlashSystems A9000R arrays
• Licensing flexibility with monthly licensing for IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software
• Improved support with Enterprise-Class Support (ECS) for IBM San Volume Controller

• Reliability, availability, and serviceability with NPIV host port fabric virtualization, Distributed RAID support for encryption, and IP Quorum in GUI
• Flexibility Virtualization of iSCSI-attached and Fibre Channel-attached external Storage arrays
• Performance with 64GB read cache
• Data economics with Comprestimator in the GUI
• Licensing of compression formally added to the External Virtualization software package of Storwize V5030
• Software licensing metrics to better align the value of SVC software with Storage use cases through Differential Licensing
• IP Link compression to improve usage of IP networks for remote-copy data transmission.

• Real-time Compression for in-line, real-time compression
• Stretched Cluster and HyperSwap for a high-availability solution
• Easy Tier for automatic and dynamic data tiering
• Distributed RAID for better availability and faster rebuild times
• Encryption for internal and external virtualized capacities
• FlashCopy snapshots
• Remote data replication
• V3500 and V3700 systems with 4GB of memory cannot be upgraded to V7.6 (RAM upgrade is required)

• Centralizing management of storage volumes to enable administrators to manage storage volumes from a single point
• Improving utilization of storage capacity with virtual volumes to enable businesses to tap into previously unused disk capacity
• Avoiding downtime for backups, maintenance, and upgrades
• Performing data migration without disruption to applications
• Enabling all storage devices to be organized into storage pools from which virtual volumes, whether standard, compressed, or thin- provisioned, are created with the desired characteristics
• Delivering automation of storage management with SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center, Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (as applicable by platform), and Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager (as applicable by platform)
• Increasing the performance efficiency of storage pools with Easy Tier
• Restoring data access quickly with near and remote copy capabilities across Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and IP networks
• HyperSwap capability in IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software V7.5 delivers high availability and disaster recovery in one solution. HyperSwap reuses capital investments in order to achieve a range of recovery and management options which are transparent to host operations.
• The ability to increase the number of FlashCopy relationships is supported with Spectrum Virtualize Software V7.5 by an increase in the bitmap space allocated for FlashCopy.
• Spectrum Virtualize Software V7.5 also now supports direct 16 Gbps Fibre Channel (except for AIX), Mircosoft Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX), VMware vSphere 6, and the underlying infrastructure for VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols).

• Real-time Compression running with dual instances
• Global Mirror increase in round-trip latency and distance between sites
• Increase in number of FlashCopy consistency groups
• T10 DIF
• Protect volumes on delete
• SMI-S 1.6 support and NIST SP 800-131A compliance

• Easy Tier for use on multiple tiers
• Automatic re-striping of data across storage pools
• Real-time Compression enhancements
• Cache architecture improvements (during upgrade to 7.3 cache is disable)
• Nine expansion enclosures with Storwize V5000 and Storwize V3700
• Storwize V7000 and Storwize V5000 new software license structure and pricing

05-2017