Re: What is the difference between Flash storage and a Flash Storage system like the V9000/V7000 -- MIDRANGE-L

Paul:

I get the reluctance to adopt VIOS. I was in your shoes not long ago. I put it up in the Agile technology stack to learn it since my customers are deploying it, and I'm convinced that for any system with more than two partitions that dual VIOS and SAN are a requirement for any upgrade. VIOS booting from SAN works just as well as internal storage and in some ways is easier to manage.

There is a learning curve, no doubt, and learning to apply firmware updates to individual cards manually is the hardest part to get over (IBM i does that for you with the hardware group PTF) and some of the command syntax is confusing at first unto you figure out the whole name/value pair combinations thing, but once your past that, it's easier to maintain the whole system.

It does come at a system administration cost. It's two more OS instances to keep updated, firmware on a switch, and the SAN to administer, but those obstacles can be over come by some patience in learning, or hire it out to those of us that do it constantly. In your case I see no problem learning what you need in short order.

Replicating between to SANs with PowerHA is just to easy, and you don't have to use iASP if you don't want to. It just takes a bit longer to fail over in that case. Flash copy makes full saves every night possible too, with little or no disruption to the users.

The the list of advantages outweigh the one single biggest downside to VIOS. IBM support for VIOS is awful. They are always in call back mode and it takes forever to get past the initial idiot on the phone to someone who can fix the problem.

Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

On Mar 27, 2018, at 8:12 PM, Steinmetz, Paul <PSteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Evan,

1) Does the V9000 do de-dup?
2) Besides Production and R&D LPARs, I have two small sandbox lpars, used as needed for testing system changes, restores, CUM applies, OS/uprades, create DSLO images, etc.

I've been avoiding the VIOS route for decades, didn't think we really needed it.
Maybe it's time to re-evalulate, with some of the new additional positives VIOS brings to the table.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Evan Harris
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2018 8:57 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: What is the difference between Flash storage and a Flash Storage system like the V9000/V7000

Hi Paul

re 3) Compression is using less space to store the data (removing duplicates etc) like zipping each sector (poor description but hopefully you get what I mean), What you are describing is de-duping which is different.
re 4) *Maybe* you could do that, but even if you could, why would you unless you only have one or two LPARs ? From memory, you have a bunch of guests so just be done with it and go the VIOS route. You will get far more value out of having the storage exposed at the LPAR layer and being able to mess with the LUNs directly for flash copy etc.

On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 1:43 PM, Steinmetz, Paul <PSteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Paul,

1) From the V9000 data sheet, it contains flash modules, AE3: 6, 8, 10 or
12 3.6 TB modules; or 8, 10 or 12 8.5 TB modules; or 8, 10 or 12
18 TB modules.
2) From what I'm reading this could configured with VIOS or without
VIOS, is this correct?
3) From the data sheet, the V9000 does data compression. Does this
also mean each block of data is only written once. If the same block
appears, does not write it again?
4) Possible configuration - attach a V9000, or smaller, to a
Production LPAR, then host storage (NWS) to a client R&D LPAR, not
sure if this is valid?

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Musselman, Paul
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2018 6:49 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: What is the difference between Flash storage and a Flash
Storage system like the V9000/V7000

We've been using the V7000 and the V9000 for the past 5 years. The
V9000 is all solid-state (Flash) memory. It's faster than SSD, which
is faster than Disk. It's the fastest storage, not counting Flash Storage.

Flash Storage (if I understand it correctly) is memory attached to the
iSeries main processor. It's like going into WRKSHRPOOL and seeing "Main
Storage Size (M) . : 4 000 000.00" That's going to make the Address
Translator -very- happy-- all that memory that we've been telling it
that it has available-- well, 4 TB of it are really there! No need to
swap all that data back to mass storage (ie the V9000), it can live in main memory.
Whuff!

We've been using SAN storage for 5 years or so now--

We started with a V7000, populated with all the disks in the world.
The disk space is lumped into a single mass of storage. It can be
sliced and diced into more usable chunks, and allocated to any
computer that can access the SAN.

The disk in the V7000 we had was RAID-10. That's mirrored raid 5-- so
it's very hard to have a failure that results in loss of data.

From the iSeries point of view, there are virtual 'disks,' but these
have no relationship to real disks. The data is doubly-dereferenced--
the iSeries RAIDed 'disks' are mapped over a chunk of the V7000's
RAID-10 storage, so you have no idea which disk(s) are actually storing your data!
Hopefully, all of them are-- random access!

We later added a Texas Memory Systems 'flash appliance' to the mix.
This is like a whole bunch of thumb drives all plugged into a single backplane.
Once again, it's RAIDed (don't remember the number) so it's hard to
lose data. We had an early system; it hadn't been IBM-ized. So one
time when we lost a memory card it required a power off to replace it.
But this is still 'remote' storage.

Then came end-of-lease, and we moved to a V9000 using flash memory.
Even more like lots of thumb drives in-a-box. The memory itself is a
2-rack-unit tall box, surrounded top and bottom by 2-rack-unit IO
boxes (don't ask me the real name-- they each have 2 channels of
access to the memory in between). In 6 rack units we have 30 or more
Terabytes of storage. Just as the V7000 with disk sliced and diced
the storage into usable chunks, so does the V9000.

Advantages-- about the fastest storage you can get (not counting a
model 9 with Terabytes of system memory-- but that's not storage.
That's live memory!). When we added that TMS Flash appliance to the
V7000, it was just plugged in, and there it was. Migrating to the
V9000 we let the V7000 talk to it, and copied the data from one to the
other. The only interruption was to bring down the CPU so our
business partner could migrate the load source to the V9000. We woke
up the *new* iSeries, et voila! We were running on a faster machine,
with no save/restore to tape, no reloading; it was like a slightly more complicated IPL. That's the nicest part about it.

Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Steinmetz, Paul
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:57 PM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion' <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: What is the difference between Flash storage and a Flash
Storage system like the V9000/V7000

What is the difference between Flash storage and a Flash Storage
System like the V9000/V7000

I found this Redbook, (a bit dated 2013) REDP-5020
https://www.scc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/11/Flash-or-SSD-Why-and-When-to-Use-FlashSystem.p
df

Thank You
_____
Paul Steinmetz
IBM i Systems Administrator

Pencor Services, Inc.
462 Delaware Ave
Palmerton Pa 18071

610-826-9117 work
610-826-9188 fax
610-349-0913 cell
610-377-6012 home

psteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx<mailto:psteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx>
http://www.pencor.com/

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Regards
Evan Harris
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