IBM Power Systems With Disk Options

IBM Power Systems HDD and SSD options offer enhanced performance at a lower cost and deliver server enhancements

Mainstream 2.5-inch SAS SSDs
New 931GB, 1.86TB, and 3.72TB mainstream 2.5-inch SAS SSDs are introduced for POWER8 servers using SAS bays.

These drives are supported in POWER8 system unit (SFF-3) and in an expansion drawer such as the EXP24SX attached to POWER8 servers (SFF-2). With their large capacity and lower cost per gigabyte, they can provide a cost-effective and footprint-effective solution for many mainstream (previously known as read-intensive) configurations. Note these drives are designed for workloads with modest write requirements, including as boot drives where SSD performance is desired. These drives are rated at 1 DWPD, meaning you can write 931GB, 1.86TB, or 3.72TB to the SSD every day for five years, nearly 1.7PB for the 960GB SSD.

When 2.5-inch SAS SSDs are placed in the EXP24SX enclosures, drives can take advantage of the extra power allotted to each enclosure slot, enabling small-op read-intensive workloads to support up to roughly 18% more IO/s (130,000 vs. 160,000 IO/s for 4KB reads).

15,000rpm 4k Block Cached HDDs
A refresh of the 300GB 15,000rpm HDDs (#ESNJ, #ESNL, #ESNK, #ESRL, #ESNM, and #ESRM) and 600GB 15,000rpm drives (#ESNN, #ESNQ, #ESNP, #ESRP, #ESNR, and #ESRR) with 4k block sizes are introduced to provide more configurations. The drive includes enhanced caching capability with 256MB DRAM, which may improve performance compared to previous 15,000rpm disk drives.

Planned availability dates:

October 13, 2017: Features EDS0 and ESC0
October 20, 2017: Feature EU2F and EU2G
October 27, 2017: Features 0303, 0323, 0324, 0393, 0394, 0401, 0402, 0469, ECR0, ECRA, ECRB, ECRC, ECRD, ECRF, ECRG, ECRJ, ECRK, EL83, EL8Y, EL92, EL96, ELE1, ELE7, ELQ6, ELQ7, ELQY, ELUJ, ELUL, ELUN, ELUQ, ELZ2, ELZ3, ELZ4, ELZ7, ELZ8, ELZZ, EQ8Y, EQ8Z, EQ96, EQ97, EQE7, EQE8, ER00, ER06, ER08, ER09, ER0A, ER0G, ER0M, ER0T, ER0U, ER0V, ER0W, ER0Z, ER10, ER11, ER12, ER13, ER17, ER18, ER19, ER1C, ER1D, ER1H, ER1L, ER30, ER36, ERC0, ERC1, ERC2, ES83, ES84, ES8Y, ES8Z, ES92, ES93, ES96, ES97, ESE1, ESE2, ESE7, ESE8, ESNJ, ESNK, ESNL, ESNM, ESNN, ESNP, ESNQ, ESNR, ESPL, ESPM, ESPQ, ESPR, ESRL, ESRM, ESRP, ESRR, ESVM, and ESVR
November 3, 2017: Feature ECP0