Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements!

(Yes, OK, it's actually Thursday. I wrote this post weeks ago, but was embargoed until Jan 10, and then was asked to wait until Jan 12 so that the IBM Marketing team could translate my text into 15 different languages.)

This week, the IBM DS8000 team announces a new High Performance Flash Enclosure (HPFE-Gen2) and a series of All-Flash Array DS8880F models that exploit this new technology.

New High Performance Flash Enclosure (HPFE-Gen2)

The original HPFE was 1U high with 16 or 30 flash cards, and could support RAID-5 or RAID-10. Most used RAID-5, resulting in four array sites of 6+P each, leaving two cards for spare. These 1.8-inch cards were only 400 or 800 GB in size, so the maximum raw capacity was only 24TB per 1U enclosure.

The new HPFE-Gen2 enclosure is a complete re-design, consisting of two Microbays and two TeraPacks. The I/O Bays attach to the Microbays via PCIe Gen3. The Microbays in turn attach to both TeraPacks via redundant 6 Gb or 12 Gb SAS.

Each TeraPack holds 24 flash cards each. Since the TeraPacks come in pairs, you can install 16, 32 or 48 flash cards per enclosure. Each 16-card set represents two array sites, for a maximum of six array sites per HPFE-Gen2.

• RAID-5 for 400/800 GB. Two 6+P arrays, four 7+P arrays, and two spares.
• RAID-6 for 400/800/1600/3200 GB. Two 5+P+Q arrays, four 6+P+Q arrays, and two spares.
• RAID-10 for 400/800/1600/3200 GB. Two 3+3 arrays, four 4+4 arrays, and four spares.

(Technically, these new "Flash cards" are 2.5-inch Solid State Drives (SSD) placed into the HPFE Gen2 connected to the PCIe Gen3 interface, with 50 percent additional capacity to tolerate up to 10 drive-writes-per-day (DWDP). IBM will continue to call them "Flash Cards" for naming consistency between the two generations of HPFE.)

The new HPFE-Gen2 enclosures are substantially faster, offering up to 90 percent more IOPS, and up to 268 percent more throughput (GB/sec). The Microbays use a new flash-optimized ASIC to perform the RAID calculations.

New All-Flash Array DS8880F models

IBM introduces the DS8884F, DS8886F and DS8888F that are based entirely on the HPFE-Gen2 enclosures described above.

Business Class	Enterprise Class	Analytic Class
DS8884 Hybrid - HDD/SSD/HPFE mix	DS8886 Hybrid - HDD/SSD/HPFE mix	DS8888 AFA - HPFE only
DS8884F AFA - HPFE-Gen2 only	DS8886F AFA - HPFE-Gen2 only	DS8888F AFA - HPFE-Gen2 only

 

New zHyperLink connection

Also, as a "Statement of Direction", IBM intends to deliver field upgradable support for zHyperLink on existing IBM System Storage DS8880 machines for connection to z System servers. zHyperLink is a short-distance, mainframe-attach link designed for lower latency than High Performance FICON.

 

Typical latency with FICON/zHPF is around 140-170 microseconds, and this new zHyperLink is estimated to reduce this down to 20-30 microseconds, but is limited to 150 meter fiber optic cable distance. zHyperLink is intended to speed up DB2® for z/OS® transaction processing and improve active log throughput.

To learn more, read the Announcement Letters for [IBM DS8880 all-flash family meets the demand for high-speed storage] and [IBM DS8880 All-Flash family Function Authorizations].

The new HPFE-Gen2 architecture design, and the All-Flash Array models they are based on, positions IBM well into the future for newer 2.5-inch SSD capacities and technologies as they become available.

technorati tags: IBM, DS8000, All-Flash Array, HPFE, HPFE-Gen2, DS8884F, DS8886F, DS8888F, zHyperLink