IBM: Flash Drives Are Now Available In Power Systems

For a long time, the compute in the IT industry is the main focus of IBM (International Business Machines Corporation), which is an American multinational technology company. In this area, the CPUs (Central Processing Units) deserve much of the credit.

But even the fastest CPU in the world is nothing if there is no peripheral to support it. In general, there are lots of other frames surrounding the CPU, and they together make a complete system. This is correct for any machines, including a power system machine.

IBM Added Mainstream Flash Drives in Power Systems

Until August 2018, IBM finally makes it possible to add flash drives in power systems. This is a big leap because the peripherals are not as good as the early AS/400, which is provided with top process technologies, advanced memory and disk drives, and innovative software.

Top Recommendation:

If your USB flash drive is not showing up after being connected to computer, please work this out immedialy.

Now, the so-called mainstream 2.5-inch flash SSDs are available for both Power8 & Power9 systems and EXP24SX expansion drawers, announced by Big Blue, in announcement letter 118-061. According to IBM, the mainstream products are referring to read heavy environments.

The Actual Situation

This holds true that: though much technological wizardry exists, writing them to flash will finally kill it. Therefore, reducing the write rates is the key factor for longevity.

Whatever happens, the new drives will be attached to SAS controllers, instead of NVM-Express ports. And there is a duty cycle of one drive write per day during the past 5 years. This is not bad as long as these two factors have been taken into account: the amount of capacity held by them and the relative size of data got in most IBM i shops.

When the drivers, which are used for data caching, are changing in the system, there will be write-intensive units which are said to have three or more drive writes each day. That is to say, the write-intensive units are able to write three or more times the total capacity of the drive, every day in the 5 years. This is amazing!

New Flash Drive

The capacity of new flash SSDs is usually 931 GB, 1.86 TB, 3.72 TB, or 7.45 TB. It is really fat even under the disk drive standards; what’s more, they are not the typical capacity you can find in IBM i shops.

For the online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, two things are very important: consistent read and write times and a heavy duty cycle.

Till now, the disk drives have worked well. The I/O rates of flash drive are very high and the capacities of them are very large; these two things make it possible for shops to see a radical improvement in the transaction throughput of their workloads. This is actually realized by moving from disk to flash memory, an inevitable upgrade of CPU or memory.

As a result, it’s vital to know where you are bound and to only spend money on this issue.

Suggestions for You

IBM’s opinion towards the particular mainstream units is: they should be used in heavy read environments only. If you’re working on building a super-fast OLTP machine, you’d better rely on mix – the mix of flash and disk and the mix of different types of flash drives. Besides, good intelligent layered software is need.

What’s more, the SSD Mainstream Fuel Gauge tool is a good choice if you want to push it. This tool is available on AIX, IBM i, and the Linux operating systems; with it, users can easily notice the status of the write life of a drive.

All in all, the action of adding flash drives in power systems is marvelous!