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 Power 10 with Enterprise 800GB Nvme drives and setting up Volume groups

larry swartz's profile image
larry swartz posted Mon August 11, 2025 10:52 AM

Hello AIX team members. I'm an IBM business partner and IBMi specialist. I have a customer that has a Power 7 box running AIX 7.1 they have 8 qty drives running raid 10 and have rootvg and two data volume groups. I'm not a AIX expert but they are looking for a new system and I am proposing a Power 10 box(9028-21B) The question I have here is how do I create the same volume groups with the Nvme drives and name spaces and how do I get the volume groups in protected raid set I know on the IBMi side a just mirror the name spaces together from each Nvme drive. I just want to make sure that I am creating the proper configuration and disk protection for the customer. Hope someone can educate me on this. We are going to AIX V7.3 in the proposal

Luis Alberto Rojas Kramer's profile image
Luis Alberto Rojas Kramer posted Mon August 11, 2025 02:17 PM

Hi Larry

As far as I know... Power10 no longer offers RAID adapter options  (they are withdrawn now)

The option I see is through the AIX LVM service, which allows you to configure disk mirroring and even LV disk striping.

This will be done in software and may not be as fast as a dedicated hardware RAID adapter with dedicated cache.

Luis Rojas

Alexander Pettitt's profile image
Alexander Pettitt posted Mon August 11, 2025 03:15 PM

RAID 10 was sometimes used for performance reasons as well as redundancy. Also it takes as little as two disks not three like RAID 5.

Are the existing disks solid state/flash or spinning? How much usable space do they have?

The S1012 only supports 4 NVMe drives so making a RAID 10 - 3 VG system seems to be out. Only supports 0.8 and 1.6 Tb drives.

The S1022 supports 8 NVMe internally so you could use six drives that would give you RAID 10 though half a much usable storage.The S1022 also supports 3.2 and 6.4 Tb drives

I wonder if the MTBF for NVMe is good enough that it could replace RAID 10 spinning drives. Of course the real issue with any flash is writes.

NVMe info taken from IBM Power10 Scale Out Servers - Technical Overview - S1012, S1014, S1022s, S1022 and S1024

SANKET RATHI's profile image
SANKET RATHI posted Tue August 12, 2025 02:13 AM

NVMe disks are solid state drives and they are far faster than spinning disks. I do not think for performance reason you need to create RAID on NVMe disks as they are very fast compare to spinning disks. 

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