Implementing Tiered Storage; Solid State Drives On A Ds5000 Storage Subsystem - IBM Midrange System DS4000 Series Hardware Manual

On a DS5000 storage subsystem, delivering these tiers will be in the form of RAID level
selection and disk types, so SDD will clearly be used for Tier 0 followed by FC 15k drives and
SATA for the lower tiers. Longer term retentions may even be put on cheaper, external, or
transportable media, such as tape, to be kept in libraries or a storage facility away from the
data center.

Implementing tiered storage

There are three areas of interest critical to implementing, maintaining, and leveraging a tiered
storage solution. These areas are:
software tools: For identification and reporting of all components of the tiered storage
solution.
virtualization: To enable control and allocation of your solution.
Offerings that are designed to provide alignment with your specific needs for IT
governance.
One useful methodology is Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). ILM is the process of
managing information, from creation, through its useful life, to its eventual destruction, in a
manner that aligns storage costs with the changing business value of information. A more
recent IBM offering is the Novus - Intelligent Storage Service Catalog (ISSC) offering, which
is a single framework aimed at providing storage optimization through more efficient
provisioning, better analytics of the storage environment, and proper alignment of data to
storage tiers. You can obtain more information about this topic at the following address:
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offering/its/a1031483

Solid State Drives on a DS5000 storage subsystem

This new, supported feature on the DS5000 series is supported as a base product on
DS5300, and DS5100 only with an EXP5000 expansion enclosure. To install SSDs on a
DS5000 storage subsystem, there are some requirements and limitations.
The SSD emulates a conventional hard disk drive, thus easily replacing it in any application.
SSDs are available with the same interfaces used by hard disk drives: Serial Advanced
Technology Attachment (SATA) and Fibre Channel (FC).
The advantages of SSDs over hard disk drives in a DS5000 storage subsystem include:
Faster start up (no spin up)
Faster access to data (no rotational latency or seek time)
Higher I/O operations per second (IOPS)
Higher reliability
Lower power usage
Less heat produced and less cooling required
Your DS5000 storage subsystem must meet the following criteria to include SSDs:
Firmware V7.60.
Only twenty SSDs are supported in a DS5000 storage subsystem.
Presently, only 73 GB SSDs are available for a DS5000 storage subsystem.
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IBM Midrange System Storage Hardware Guide