Systems Storage Hierarchy; H.1 Flash Express Overview - IBM z13s Technical Manual

H.1 Flash Express overview

Flash Express, which is implemented by using Flash SSDs mounted in Peripheral
Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Flash Express feature cards, is available as carry
forward or as a new order for z13s servers.
Flash Express is an innovative solution that is designed to help improve availability and
performance to provide a higher level of quality of service. It is designed to automatically
improve availability for key workloads at critical processing times and to improve access time
for critical business z/OS workloads. It can also reduce latency time during diagnostic
collection (memory dump operations). In addition, CFCC Level 20 can take advantage of
Flash Express as an overflow device for shared queue data in clustered WebSphere MQ
deployments.
Figure H-1 illustrates how Flash Express introduces a new level in the z Systems storage
hierarchy.
Access time to data increases from top to the base of the
Figure H-1 z Systems storage hierarchy
Flash Express is an optional PCIe card feature that is available on zEC12, zBC12, z13, and
z13s servers. Flash Express cards are supported in PCIe I/O drawers, and can be mixed with
other PCIe I/O cards, such as Fibre Channel connection (FICON) Express16S, Crypto
Express5S, and Open Systems Adapter (OSA) Express5S cards. You can order a minimum
of two features (FC 0403) and a maximum of eight features.
increments of two.
Flash Express cards are assigned one physical channel ID (PCHID) although they have no
ports. No hardware configuration definition (HCD) or input/output configuration program
(IOCP) definition is required for Flash Express installation. Flash Expressuses subchannels
that are allocated from the 25K that is reserved in subchannel set 0. Similar to other PCIe I/O
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FC 0402 can also be carried forward. The total number of Flash Express features (carry forward + new order)
cannot exceed eight per z Systems server.
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IBM z13s Technical Guide
CPU
Cache
Random Access
Memory (RAM)
Flash Express
Solid State Drive (SSD) Storage
Spinning Disk Drive
WORM, Tape Library
pyramid
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The cards are ordered in