IBM Spectrum Control 5.4 and Virtual Storage Center 5.4 Update

IBM Spectrum Control 5.4 and IBM Virtual Storage Center 5.4 updates

IBM Spectrum Control 5.4 is the first release in a series of continuous delivery releases with improvements in each release.

The most important enhancement in this release is the ability to connect to Brocade FC switches without the need to install, configure, and maintain Brocade Network Advisor software, which was required because it included the industry- standard API SMI-S.

The calculation of required licenses has been improved, along with the way the information is displayed for each storage system. The license changes announced in 5.3.6 and 5.3.7 have been incorporated so that the panel shows all four categories of Storage Capacity Units (SCUs), determines the required select licenses based on the number of slots, and calculates the physical raw capacity of the drives.

Additionally, Spectrum Control will show both the VOLSER and volume name for DS8000 at the same time by adding a specific VOLSER column.

Starting with Spectrum Control 5.4, the provisioning function is no longer supported. Recent improvements in support of Ansible by the Spectrum Virtualize family of products provide alternatives that can be better automated and integrated with other provisioning tasks.

To clearly document which functions are no longer supported, the feature history topic in IBM Knowledge Center has been updated with those functions that are no longer supported together with the support matrix, which lists the supported versions.

Planned availability date: August 20, 2020