With the announcement of 900GB 10K RPM drives for the Storwize V7000, the range of possible drives you can order is now even more outstanding.
In the 2.5″ form factor IBM has the following 10K RPM drives:
Feature 3203 300GB 2.5 inch. 10k SAS HDD Feature 3204 450GB 2.5 inch. 10k SAS HDD Feature 3206 600GB 2.5 inch. 10k SAS HDD Feature 3509 900GB 2.5 inch. 10k SAS HDD <-- NEW!
In the 2.5″ form factor IBM also has the following 15K RPM drives:
Feature 3251 146GB 2.5 inch. 15k SAS HDD Feature 3253 300GB 2.5-inch. 15K SAS HDD
In the 2.5″ form factor IBM also has the following Solid State Drives:
Feature 3512 200GB 2.5-inch. SAS E-MLC SSD Feature 3504 300GB 2.5 inch. SAS E-MLC SSD Feature 3514 400GB 2.5-inch. SAS E-MLC SSD
In the 2.5″ form factor IBM also has the following 7.2K RPM nearline-SAS drive:
Feature 3271 1 TB 2.5-inch 7.2k Nearline-SAS HDD
In the 3.5″ form factor IBM also has the following 7.2K RPM nearline-SAS drives:
Feature 3302 2TB 3.5 inch. 7.2k Nearline-SAS HDD Feature 3303 3TB 3.5 inch. 7.2k Nearline-SAS HDD
The big question of course is which drive type to choose? The answer is that ideally you should possess three pieces of information:
- How much usable space do you need in GB or TiB? Don’t confuse binary and decimal!
- What is your typical I/O profile. For instance 70% reads 30% writes, 32KB block size.
- What are your IOPS and response time requirements?
Armed with this information, get your IBM Sales Rep or Business Partner to model your requirements using Capacity Magic and Disk Magic. These modelling tools will tell you how much usable capacity a particular configuration will give you and what performance you can expect to get from it (given a particular I/O profile). If you don’t know your I/O profile or IOPS requirements, you can still see performance modeling using industry standard benchmarks.
Thanks for the update and welcome back
Thanks!
Hi Anthon. I wish also a nice welcome back Take care with mail inbox, it can be heavy weighted…
About your three pieces for a correct storage box sizing, i can’t be more sticked to this. As a matter of everyday work, i feel just like being in a loop reclaiming this kind of information from customers or BPs. I will add that a high percentage of customers does’t know anything about their workload patterns, thanks to he historical lack of performance reports or tools in not so old hardware, or just by the usual ‘no time to do that…’
So, what to do in such situation ? Well, one approach can be to model -if possible- with DiskMagic legacy storage boxes still in use, and try to get from the customer an idea of ‘how better’ they want their new storage. Put that in the mix, and you have a rough specification for your upcoming configuration.
Caparros
Hi Jordy.
Thanks for your long and well thought out comment. I really appreciate it.
I totally agree with your thoughts, most clients don’t have well set expectations. They know how much storage they need, but not much else and no time or methodology to work it out.
Your modelling idea is spot on, if you can compare a fixed workload from old to new, that’s a great way of showing the difference.
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nice…thr r lots of surprises for V7K in the 1stH of 2012.
Sure are….some very cool things on the announce schedule!