Hello (yet) again, everybody. Is a "Turbo Performance" license, or the like, required to use SSDs in IBM/Lenovo v5000 Gen1 and v3700 Gen1 SANs? In other words, does the existence of an SSD automatically mean an additional license was purchased, which would then also need to be accounted for?

If yes, from a security perspective, is it best to remove the license before the SAN is disposed of, or is it only usable on the SAN to which the license was originally assigned?

Hi,

I don't believe so. I think the turbo performance licenses delivers a boost in IOPS and throughput, but you could still have a system that uses SSDs without the additional license.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Darren

Hello (yet) again, everybody. Is a "Turbo Performance" license, or the like, required to use SSDs in IBM/Lenovo v5000 Gen1 and v3700 Gen1 SANs? In other words, does the existence of an SSD automatically mean an additional license was purchased, which would then also need to be accounted for?

If yes, from a security perspective, is it best to remove the license before the SAN is disposed of, or is it only usable on the SAN to which the license was originally assigned?

Thank you for replying, Darren! While I may be going off on a tangent, I'm an inquisitive bugger!

So, if SSD speeds are in no way capped by default, how does the turbo license achieve maximum IOPS and throughput?

Also, on a somewhat related note, from what I've read online, the v3700 and v5000 SANs each offer the following licensed features.

v3700: Turbo Performance, FlashCopy Upgrade, Easy Tier and Remote Mirroring
v5000: Easy Tier, Flash Copy, Remote Mirroring and External Virtualization

However, unless I'm reading it wrong, the following link seems to suggest certain functions, such as Easy Tier, which appears to utilizes SSDs, are actually included with the v5000. Is that true?

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/flashsystem-5x00/7.8.x?topic=to-easy-tier-function

Hi,

I don't believe so. I think the turbo performance licenses delivers a boost in IOPS and throughput, but you could still have a system that uses SSDs without the additional license.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Darren

Hello (yet) again, everybody. Is a "Turbo Performance" license, or the like, required to use SSDs in IBM/Lenovo v5000 Gen1 and v3700 Gen1 SANs? In other words, does the existence of an SSD automatically mean an additional license was purchased, which would then also need to be accounted for?

If yes, from a security perspective, is it best to remove the license before the SAN is disposed of, or is it only usable on the SAN to which the license was originally assigned?

Hi John,

No problem. There's not a lot of detail out there on how the turbo performance feature works, but I think it basically utilises CPU resource in the controller to help take IO load (IO read/write calculations) off the individual drives. As there is a lot more "grunt" in the controllers this provides the performance boost, allowing the drives to operate more efficiently by just letting them do their job of reading and writing data blocks.

You are correct about the Easy Tier being there by default on the V5000 arrays. When you have multiple drive technology tiers in the V5000, such as Flash/SSD and spinning disks, the system will produce a data block heat map every 24 hours. The hot blocks of data, which are those blocks that are accessed most frequently, are moved to the more performant flash storage tier and the colder blocks (least accessed) are moved down to the slower performance tier. So there data that is access most is always on the higher performance tier to improve data access performance.

You can still provision volumes that only use flash storage or only use spinning disk storage, i.e. do not use easy tier. But when you create a volume that has easy tier enabled, then you don't need to specify which tier is used. This is enabled at the storage pool level, by creating a pool that has both disk and flask managed disks included. Hope this makes sense?

Please let me know if you need any more info.

Cheers

Darren

Thank you for replying, Darren! While I may be going off on a tangent, I'm an inquisitive bugger!

So, if SSD speeds are in no way capped by default, how does the turbo license achieve maximum IOPS and throughput?

Also, on a somewhat related note, from what I've read online, the v3700 and v5000 SANs each offer the following licensed features.

v3700: Turbo Performance, FlashCopy Upgrade, Easy Tier and Remote Mirroring
v5000: Easy Tier, Flash Copy, Remote Mirroring and External Virtualization

However, unless I'm reading it wrong, the following link seems to suggest certain functions, such as Easy Tier, which appears to utilizes SSDs, are actually included with the v5000. Is that true?

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/flashsystem-5x00/7.8.x?topic=to-easy-tier-function

Hi,

I don't believe so. I think the turbo performance licenses delivers a boost in IOPS and throughput, but you could still have a system that uses SSDs without the additional license.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Darren

Hello (yet) again, everybody. Is a "Turbo Performance" license, or the like, required to use SSDs in IBM/Lenovo v5000 Gen1 and v3700 Gen1 SANs? In other words, does the existence of an SSD automatically mean an additional license was purchased, which would then also need to be accounted for?

If yes, from a security perspective, is it best to remove the license before the SAN is disposed of, or is it only usable on the SAN to which the license was originally assigned?