Re: i on Blade - Experiences?

["Lukas Beeler" <lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 2:19 AM, Walden H. Leverich
<WaldenL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Which makes absolutely no sense. Given that i doesn't directly access
> the drive anyway, and relies on VIOS to handle the disk io (including
> translation between 512 and 520 byte sectors) why the hell should they
> care what the underlying technology is. Hell, in a SAN the LUNs
> themselves are effectively virtualized, so again, why should IBM i care.

In case of the BladeCenter S, the drives are accessed by VIOS directly
using the SAS Controller / SAS Backplane / SAS Switch in the
BladeCenter S.

This is not a SAN - it's direct access to the disks (which also means
your options for RAID levels are restricted to RAID1/0/10).

In case of the BladeCenter H, you can use FC to connect to a SAN - in
that case you could use SATA/FATA Disks. This also allows the use of
RAID5 or RAID6, which are not a possibility on the BladeCenter S.

See here:
http://www.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/blades/i_on_blade_readme.pdf

Point 4.2:

Use Fibre Channel (FC) drives (and not SATA or FATA) to create the
RAID ranks for
production IBM i workloads