Ds8000 Series Performance Features - IBM DS8000 User Manual

DS8000 series performance features

The DS8000 series is designed to provide you with high-performance, connectivity,
and reliability allowing your workload to be easily consolidated into a single
storage subsystem.
The following list provides an overview of some of the features that are associated
with the DS8000 series:
Storage pool striping (rotate extents)
POWER5+ processor technology
Industry standard fibre-channel disk drives
Four-port fibre-channel/FICON adapters
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DS8000 User's Guide
Storage pool striping is now supported on the DS8000 series, providing
improved performance. The storage pool striping function stripes new
volumes across all ranks of an extent pool. The striped volume layout
reduces administration that is required to balance system loads. With
storage pool striping support, the system automatically performs close to
highest efficiency, requiring little or no administration. The effectiveness of
performance management tools is also enhanced, because imbalances tend
to occur as isolated problems. When performance administration is
required, it is applied more precisely. Storage pool striping can be
managed and configured via the DS Storage Manager, DS CLI, and DS
Open API. The storage pool striping function is provided with the DS8000
series at no additional charge.
The DS8000 series features IBM POWER5+ server technology. Compared
with the current IBM POWER5 processor, the POWER5+ processor allows
up to a 15% performance improvement in I/O operations per second in
transaction processing workload environments. The POWER5+ processor is
included only in the 93x/9Bx models, and it is an optional feature in the
92x/9Ax models.
The DS8000 series offers a selection of fibre-channel disk drives, including
300 GB fibre channel drives and 500 GB fibre-channel ATA (FATA) disk
drives that allow a DS8100 to scale up to a capacity of 192 TB and a
DS8300 to scale up to a capacity of 512 TB. The 500 GB FATA disk drives
are lower cost disk drives that are designed for applications that require
disk drive duty cycles that are equal to or less than 20%. If you use the
FATA disk drives for applications that require duty cycles greater than
20%, your application is likely to experience limited array throughput and
reduced performance. The 500 GB FATA disk drives are designed to
support applications that use fixed-content or reference-only data,
applications that are used for data archival operations, or near-line
applications that require large amounts of data. Intermix of the FATA disk
drive sets and fibre-channel disk drive sets is not supported within a disk
enclosure or at creation. However, intermix on the same DA loop of
enclosures with different drive types is supported if the drives within each
enclosure are the same.
The DS8000 series offers enhanced connectivity with four-port
fibre-channel/FICON host adapters. Four GB fibre-channel/FICON host
support offers improvement that is up to 50 percent of the MB/second
throughput performance for a single port. This improved performance
enables cost savings by reducing the number of required host ports. These
4 GB host adapters are offered in longwave and shortwave. They
auto-negotiate to either 4 GB or 2 GB link speeds. This flexibility provides