Ibm High Iops Adapters - IBM x3850 X6 Planning And Implementation Manual

Each eXFlash unit can accommodate up to eight 1.8-inch hot-swap front-accessible SSDs,
and it occupies four 2.5-inch SAS hard disk drive bays. You can install the following number
of eXFlash units:
The x3850 X6 can have up to 16x 1.8-inch SSDs with up to two eXFlash units (up to eight
SSDs per eXFlash unit).
The x3950 X6 can have up to 32x 1.8-inch SSDs with up to four eXFlash units.
IBM eXFlash solution can provide the following benefits:
Significantly lower implementation cost of high performance I/O-intensive storage systems
Significantly higher performance and better response time of storage-intensive
applications with up to ten times less response time comparing with solutions based on
spinning hard drives
Significant savings in power and cooling with high performance per watt ratio
IBM eXFlash is optimized for a heavy mix of random read and write operations, such as
transaction processing, data mining, business intelligence, and decision support, as well as
other random I/O-intensive applications. Built on enterprise-grade MLC NAND flash memory,
the SSD drives used in eXFlash deliver up to 30,000 IOPS per single drive. Combined into an
eXFlash unit, these drives can deliver up to 240,000 IOPS and up to 2 GBps of sustained
read throughput per eXFlash unit. In addition to its superior performance, eXFlash offers
superior uptime with three times the reliability of mechanical disk drives. SSDs have no
moving parts to fail.
IBM eXFlash requires the following components:
IBM eXFlash hot-swap SAS SSD backplane
1.8-inch solid state drives (SSDs)
IBM disk controllers
For more information about IBM eXFlash SSDs, see the following reference:
Choosing eXFlash Storage on IBM eX5 Servers
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4807.html?Open

2.6.4 IBM High IOPS adapters

The IBM High IOPS SSD PCIe Adapters provide a next level of high-performance storage
based on solid state device technology. Designed for high-performance servers and
computing appliances, these adapters deliver throughput of up to 900,000 I/O operations per
second (IOPS), while providing the added benefits of lower power, cooling, and management
overhead and a smaller storage footprint. Maximum capacity of IBM High IOPS adapters is up
to 2.4 TB.
The IBM High IOPS PCIe Adapters combine high IOPS performance with very low latency. As
an example, with 512 KB block random reads, the IBM 1.2TB High IOPS MLC Mono Adapter
can deliver 143,000 IOPS, compared with 420 IOPS for a 15K RPM 146 GB disk drive. The
read access latency is about 68 microseconds, which is one hundredth of the latency of a
15K RPM 146 GB disk drive. The write access latency is even less, with about 15
microseconds.
Reliability features include the use of enterprise-grade MLC (eMLC), advanced wear-leveling,
ECC protection, and Adaptive Flashback redundancy for RAID-like chip protection with
self-healing capabilities, providing unparalleled reliability and efficiency. Advanced bad-block
management algorithms enable taking blocks out of service when their failure rate becomes
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Chapter 2. Technology