IBM Spectrum Control V5.3 and Virtual Storage Center V5.3

IBM Spectrum Control V5.3 and IBM Virtual Storage Center V5.3 deliver support for IBM FlashSystem 9100 systems and enhanced reporting

IBM Spectrum Control V5.3 is the latest release in a series of continuous delivery releases with improvements in each release.

One area of enhancement in this release is the ability to create reports of information from within the web UI. The reports can be directly run or scheduled to be running later. When a report is run, it can be sent by email or exported and saved in different file types.

Support for IBM FlashSystem 9100 has been added so that customers can manage the capacity, performance, services, and health using reports and alerts from the same GUI that can be used for other storage devices, SAN fabrics, and servers, as well as applications and departments.

FlashSystem 9100 systems are virtualized, NVMe-based, all-flash, software-defined storage solutions designed to unlock the power of your data by combining the latest Spectrum Virtualize, FlashCore, Storage Insights, and FlashSystem 9100 multicoud software technologies.

Spectrum Control comes in different editions, and some of them are licensed based on the number of slots in an enclosure. For most of the eligible IBM Storage systems, the counting of the number of required enclosures has been automated, reducing the work that goes into configuring Spectrum Control to calculate the total number of licenses required.

Together with the latest enhancements of this new version and release, the use of continuous delivery as the support policy for Spectrum Control V5.3 is now being offered.

To clearly document which functions are no longer supported, a new document will be made available. This documentation is part of IBM Knowledge Center and will list information such as IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication will no longer be supported when using version 5.3. This means that Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication is still supported as long as V5.2 is supported, and customers are recommended to migrate to IBM Copy Service Manager which is part of any Spectrum Control edition. When the end of support of Spectrum Control 5.2.x is reached (a year after the announcement), it will mean that support for Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication will no longer be provided.

Key prerequisites

• Virtual Storage Center and Virtual Storage Center Entry Edition require IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) nodes.
• Virtual Storage Center for Storwize requires an IBM Storwize system.

Planned availability date: September 6, 2018, electronic download only. There is no physical media.