IBM i Global

Let's see if I grasped your presentation (After all we are separated by a common language!) 

NVMe are faster.

NVMe are cheaper.

Question: Can I replace a failed NVMe without having to power down the server or restart the Operating system?

Observation: I was rather surprised that RAID6 beat Mirror on the read and write tests. Given RAID-6 needs to do reads and many writes to update any bit of data while mirror simply goes about its two writes. Hmmm.

Thank you for pointing out that it's much more than JUST the disk units. The SAS RAID controllers and backplane bits make up a very large part of the cost and those expansion drawers bring both purchase and recurring costs!  While it's clearly less of an impact I would expect the NVMe configuration to require fewer motivated electrons to keep them running and thus generate fewer BTUs of heat to dissipate as well. 

One other thing, here in the U.S. we're not all driving Porsche's we all have great big heavy duty pickup trucks with massive V8 engines to carry us and our laptops and coffee cups, so the stack of gold ingots in the bed don't slow us down too much. ;-) 

Excellent presentation, thanks for sharing!!!

------------------------------
Larry Bolhuis
Chief i-entist
Frankeni Technology Consulting, LLC
Middleville MI
6162604746

Original Message:
Sent: Mon March 22, 2021 07:26 AM
From: Steve Bradshaw
Subject: What's all the fuss about NMVe's?

Hi Guys

I thought I'd take a break from the IBM P9 unboxing videos to do a little research into NMVe's and the sort of impact they could have on a typical Scale Out POWER9 S914 server.

The video below is a link to the presentation I have at the i-UG.co.uk Hybrid event in my home town of Wolverhampton last week
https://www.rowtonit.com/whats-all-the-fuss-about-nvme

I thought I would share it on here in case any of you had wondered what sort of effect this new type of storage might have on IBM i?
Spoiler Alert, they really are faster and cheaper than HDD's ;-)

Cheers Brad

PS Don't worry, no servers of techies we harmed in the making or delivery of this presentation ;-)

Let's see if I grasped your presentation (After all we are separated by a common language!) 

NVMe are faster.

NVMe are cheaper.

Question: Can I replace a failed NVMe without having to power down the server or restart the Operating system?

Observation: I was rather surprised that RAID6 beat Mirror on the read and write tests. Given RAID-6 needs to do reads and many writes to update any bit of data while mirror simply goes about its two writes. Hmmm.

Thank you for pointing out that it's much more than JUST the disk units. The SAS RAID controllers and backplane bits make up a very large part of the cost and those expansion drawers bring both purchase and recurring costs!  While it's clearly less of an impact I would expect the NVMe configuration to require fewer motivated electrons to keep them running and thus generate fewer BTUs of heat to dissipate as well. 

One other thing, here in the U.S. we're not all driving Porsche's we all have great big heavy duty pickup trucks with massive V8 engines to carry us and our laptops and coffee cups, so the stack of gold ingots in the bed don't slow us down too much. ;-) 

Excellent presentation, thanks for sharing!!!

------------------------------
Larry Bolhuis
Chief i-entist
Frankeni Technology Consulting, LLC
Middleville MI
6162604746

Original Message:
Sent: Mon March 22, 2021 07:26 AM
From: Steve Bradshaw
Subject: What's all the fuss about NMVe's?

Hi Guys

I thought I'd take a break from the IBM P9 unboxing videos to do a little research into NMVe's and the sort of impact they could have on a typical Scale Out POWER9 S914 server.

The video below is a link to the presentation I have at the i-UG.co.uk Hybrid event in my home town of Wolverhampton last week
https://www.rowtonit.com/whats-all-the-fuss-about-nvme

I thought I would share it on here in case any of you had wondered what sort of effect this new type of storage might have on IBM i?
Spoiler Alert, they really are faster and cheaper than HDD's ;-)

Cheers Brad

PS Don't worry, no servers of techies we harmed in the making or delivery of this presentation ;-)

Frank,
  
    I would say that Rochester not recommending VIOS is perhaps a bit strong. 

    Certainly an alternative for IBM i customers is to use IBM i hosting in this environment.  It removes the need to know VIOS and focuses on the strength of IBM i. For customers who do not want external storage then VIOS isn't needed either. IBM i can share storage, provide networking, and share tape drives and more recently tape libraries. 

    Perhaps Steve will run his same I/O tests on a guest partition of IBM i on his servers to see what the numbers are in that configuration!

Steve,

I was listening to your presentation, and I have sold several small systems with NVMe's so I know it quite well.

But I have asked Rochester and  with no answer so far:

1. NVME's are so fast and we can on a P10 have pretty much data, and I would like to us VIOS to have e.g 2-3 LPAR's

2. Rochester does not recommend VIOS, but I think they at least could  test how much the performance degradtion will be, because the alternative is to still sell and install external storage, and many customers don't like that.

Any comment to this ?



    Mobil: +47 92292811
    E-mail: frank.johansen@kvikt.no




Fra:        

IBM hostingi works fine, I have sold and installed that, but VIOS is a better solution.

If someone could test the performance degration that would be fine.



    Mobil: +47 92292811
    E-mail: frank.johansen@kvikt.no




Fra:        

Frank,
  
    I would say that Rochester not recommending VIOS is perhaps a bit strong. 

    Certainly an alternative for IBM i customers is to use IBM i hosting in this environment.  It removes the need to know VIOS and focuses on the strength of IBM i. For customers who do not want external storage then VIOS isn't needed either. IBM i can share storage, provide networking, and share tape drives and more recently tape libraries. 

    Perhaps Steve will run his same I/O tests on a guest partition of IBM i on his servers to see what the numbers are in that configuration!

Steve,

I was listening to your presentation, and I have sold several small systems with NVMe's so I know it quite well.

But I have asked Rochester and  with no answer so far:

1. NVME's are so fast and we can on a P10 have pretty much data, and I would like to us VIOS to have e.g 2-3 LPAR's

2. Rochester does not recommend VIOS, but I think they at least could  test how much the performance degradtion will be, because the alternative is to still sell and install external storage, and many customers don't like that.

Any comment to this ?



    Mobil: +47 92292811
    E-mail: frank.johansen@kvikt.no




Fra:        

Frank,

    I would like to see your reasoning for why VIOS is a better solution IN THIS CASE.   

    I have an entire presentation that pits the pros and cons of VIOS hosting with IBM i hosting. It is not meant to prove one or the other is better but to use as a scorecard to determine in any given situation which of the two fits the bill better.  Areas where VOS excels include the ability to have dual servers for redundancy, provide connectivity to external storage, support partition mobility, partition suspend/resume, and active memory expansion.  It also does not consume IBM i license cores. Only this last is an advantage in the situation you are describing. 

    On the flip side, when viewed from the seat of an IBM i specialist VIOS is not as easy to maintain. It requires manual updating of device firmware, uses a command language foreign to many IBM i admins, uses completely different logic for slicing up hosted disk for client LPARs, and as noted in a thread on a thread over on midrange.com just this week, the process to replace a failed drive in VIOS is not at all as simple as it is for IBM i. And neither is backing it up.

    I would argue that there is no one best hosting solution for Power Systems, as we in the land of consulting love to say: "It Depends!"

     - Larry 

------------------------------
Larry Bolhuis
Chief i-entist
Frankeni Technology Consulting, LLC
Middleville MI
6162604746
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Wed March 24, 2021 06:06 AM
From: Frank Johansen
Subject: What's all the fuss about NMVe's?

IBM hostingi works fine, I have sold and installed that, but VIOS is a better solution.

If someone could test the performance degration that would be fine.



    Mobil: +47 92292811
    E-mail: frank.johansen@kvikt.no




Fra:        

Frank,
  
    I would say that Rochester not recommending VIOS is perhaps a bit strong. 

    Certainly an alternative for IBM i customers is to use IBM i hosting in this environment.  It removes the need to know VIOS and focuses on the strength of IBM i. For customers who do not want external storage then VIOS isn't needed either. IBM i can share storage, provide networking, and share tape drives and more recently tape libraries. 

    Perhaps Steve will run his same I/O tests on a guest partition of IBM i on his servers to see what the numbers are in that configuration!

Steve,

I was listening to your presentation, and I have sold several small systems with NVMe's so I know it quite well.

But I have asked Rochester and  with no answer so far:

1. NVME's are so fast and we can on a P10 have pretty much data, and I would like to us VIOS to have e.g 2-3 LPAR's

2. Rochester does not recommend VIOS, but I think they at least could  test how much the performance degradtion will be, because the alternative is to still sell and install external storage, and many customers don't like that.

Any comment to this ?



    Mobil: +47 92292811
    E-mail: frank.johansen@kvikt.no




Fra:        

IBM has stated following:



And I have just asked, how much will the performance degradation be ?

We have now extremely fast storage units with NVMe's and can have large capacities, up to 30-40 TB, and this will probably be increased in the future

So, therefore I can see that in cases where we normally install external storage with VIOS, then it would be better for the customer to use NVMe's with VIOS with a System i environment only.

I am not a deep technical person, but my understanding of  IBM Hosting i, then the client partitions are dependent of the main partition, and with VIOS we have VIOS with reduncancy, and that owns all the hardware, and more or less can see the LPAR's  as different physical systems.

So VIOS has been used for larger System i systems, but as mentioned with the capacities and speed of NVMe's then I think it's
neccessary to test and evaluate VIOS with such an environment.









    Mobil: +47 92292811
    E-mail: frank.johansen@kvikt.no




Fra:        

Frank,

    I would like to see your reasoning for why VIOS is a better solution IN THIS CASE.   

    I have an entire presentation that pits the pros and cons of VIOS hosting with IBM i hosting. It is not meant to prove one or the other is better but to use as a scorecard to determine in any given situation which of the two fits the bill better.  Areas where VOS excels include the ability to have dual servers for redundancy, provide connectivity to external storage, support partition mobility, partition suspend/resume, and active memory expansion.  It also does not consume IBM i license cores. Only this last is an advantage in the situation you are describing. 

    On the flip side, when viewed from the seat of an IBM i specialist VIOS is not as easy to maintain. It requires manual updating of device firmware, uses a command language foreign to many IBM i admins, uses completely different logic for slicing up hosted disk for client LPARs, and as noted in a thread on a thread over on midrange.com just this week, the process to replace a failed drive in VIOS is not at all as simple as it is for IBM i. And neither is backing it up.

    I would argue that there is no one best hosting solution for Power Systems, as we in the land of consulting love to say: "It Depends!"

     - Larry 

------------------------------
Larry Bolhuis
Chief i-entist
Frankeni Technology Consulting, LLC
Middleville MI
6162604746

Original Message:
Sent: Wed March 24, 2021 06:06 AM
From: Frank Johansen
Subject: What's all the fuss about NMVe's?

IBM hostingi works fine, I have sold and installed that, but VIOS is a better solution.

If someone could test the performance degration that would be fine.



    Mobil: +47 92292811
    E-mail: frank.johansen@kvikt.no




Fra:        

Frank,
  
    I would say that Rochester not recommending VIOS is perhaps a bit strong. 

    Certainly an alternative for IBM i customers is to use IBM i hosting in this environment.  It removes the need to know VIOS and focuses on the strength of IBM i. For customers who do not want external storage then VIOS isn't needed either. IBM i can share storage, provide networking, and share tape drives and more recently tape libraries. 

    Perhaps Steve will run his same I/O tests on a guest partition of IBM i on his servers to see what the numbers are in that configuration!

Steve,

I was listening to your presentation, and I have sold several small systems with NVMe's so I know it quite well.

But I have asked Rochester and  with no answer so far:

1. NVME's are so fast and we can on a P10 have pretty much data, and I would like to us VIOS to have e.g 2-3 LPAR's

2. Rochester does not recommend VIOS, but I think they at least could  test how much the performance degradtion will be, because the alternative is to still sell and install external storage, and many customers don't like that.

Any comment to this ?



    Mobil: +47 92292811
    E-mail: frank.johansen@kvikt.no




Fra: