IBM Flash Storage – The advantages of NVMe
Data is every companies most precious asset. These storage sub systems house information on business transactions, confidential employee and customer information, and the business analytics that keep your business thriving. It is the one place no business should settle for commodity hardware.
IBM Flash Storage is built to provide the highest level of functionality, performance and availability from the entry to the enterprise level storage arrays. Regardless of which class storage fits your business needs, IBM provides a storage solution for you. If your business should grow out of the current level of storage array, rest assured that no additional training would be required, as IBM uses the same operating system on all of its arrays with the same look and feel whether you are on the highest level of enterprise hardware the DS8900F of the entry level DS5100.
What does Gartner have to say about IBM?
IBM is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. IBM has revitalized its FlashSystem SSD and hybrid array portfolio, along with its high-end DS8900F SSD offerings, thus covering primary storage workloads from the mainframe to general-purpose storage environments. To strengthen its position in the primary storage market, IBM is concentrating on providing advanced engineering solutions to accelerate performance, expand security features to protect against cyber attacks and ransomware attacks, and strengthen public cloud affinity. Learn more about the storage benefits of IBM FlashSystems here.
IBM FlashSystem 9200R - Enterprise Level Storage
The Rack-based IBM FlashSystem 9200R solutions are based on clustered IBM FlashSystem 9200 storage arrays. The IBM FlashSystem 9200 arrays utilize IBM FlashCore technology packaged into a 2.5-inch solid-state drive (SSD) form factor and using an NVMe interface. These FlashCore Modules (FCMs) deliver powerful inline, hardware-accelerated compression technology without performance impact, consistent microsecond latency and extreme reliability. The IBM FlashCore technology has enabled very high flash density and storage capacity which has been further increased with a new 38.4TB module. The IBM FlashSystem 9200R solutions can scale up to 32 petabytes and deliver performance of 180 GB/s throughput and 18 million IOPS.
The IBM FlashSystem 5100 is NVMe-optimized, with support for NVMe over fabrics for the highest end-to-end storage performance. NVMe flash drives accelerate workloads and lower storage latency to accelerate application performance and business productivity. IBM FlashCore innovations include a hardware-accelerated NVM architecture and advanced flash management features that not only increase flash endurance, but also accelerate performance while reducing latency. The FlashSystem 5100 also supports the “iSCSI Extensions for Remote Directory Memory Access” (iSER) protocols. When iSCSI supported adapters utilize iSER, the TCP/IP layer is not used in favor of the iSER protocol. This dramatically reduces latency and increases performance.
The GUI Interface:
Every storage array from IBM utilizes the same graphical interface the IBM Spectrum Virtualize™ software . IBM Spectrum Virtualize provides the data services foundation for IBM FlashSystems. Its industry-leading capabilities include a wide range of data services , such as:
- Automated data movement
- Synchronous and asynchronous copy services either on-premises or to the public cloud
- High availability configurations
- Storage tiering and data reduction technologies including deduplication, among many others
- Flash copy services
The Command Line Interface (CLI)
Some of the functionality for some advanced features or to automate features on the IBM Flash Systems can take advantage of the Command Line Interface. For example, when we moved a large server from as IBM Power8 to an IBM Power9 server, a request was made to have a complete backup copy prior to the move of the data. This copy needed to be immediately available as a backout plan. We utilized flash copy to make a pristine point in time backup prior to the move. Typically, a flash copy backup would run in the background, but by utilizing the CLI we were able to change the priority of the flash copy process allowing for the backup to finish faster allowing for the move to take place within the required time period.
The NVMe design
Taking a State-of-the-art flash drive and connecting it to a legacy SATA or SAS adapter greatly reduces the throughput of the storage I/O. NVMe solves the problem that occurs when fast flash-based storage collides with legacy data transport technologies.
The Latency advantage of NVMe
The latency of the NVMe drives is 2 to 3 microseconds and when compared to the SATA system latency of 30 to 100 microseconds the latency advantage is roughly a 10:1 advantage.
The Speed advantage of NVMe Vs SATA
We all know that SSD drives are fast. They are so fast, that their limiting factor is not their own hardware, but rather the SATA or SAS connection that hard drives use. Non-Volatile Memory Expressor NVMe is an open standard developed to allow modern SSDs to operate at the read/write speeds their flash memory is capable of. Essentially, it allows flash memory to operate as an SSD directly through the PCIe interface rather being slowed down by their SATA or SAS adapters and thereby being limited to SATA or SAS speeds.
SATA III for example is limited to 600 MB/Sec and when compared to the NVMe speed of 3500 MB/Sec. That is almost 6x the throughput speed of SATA III and over 35x the speed of traditional spinning disk.
Availability is of crucial importance for business:
Downtime causes an immediate impact including loss of customer loyalty and financial costs. The IBM Spectrum Virtualize software in the FlashSystem 5100 delivers six 9s (99.9999%) data availability. These systems provide no single point of failure, enterprise proven software, and the ability to perform maintenance concurrently with an outage.
Strengths:
- IBM offers a broad portfolio of external enterprise storage arrays for the primary storage market that are competitive from a pricing, performance and feature perspective within their respective market segments.
- From entry to high end, the IBM FlashSystem storage array family utilizes a common storage operating system, APIs and management for its SSD and hybrid array models.
- A global presence, associated with a competent and mature support infrastructure, sustains IBM’s position as a leading provider of enterprise storage solutions for the primary storage market.