RE: Explaining single level store to non i people

Having the swap partition on SSDs would be the wrong thing to do, SSDs have a limited write life, thus what you want is data that rarely changes but is highly accessed. My understanding of a swap partition is that data is swapped in and out thus I would expect a high percentage of writes.

Duane Christen


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Duane Christen
Senior Software Engineer
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-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Hans Boldt
Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 10:37 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Explaining single level store to non i people

Tami wrote:

Don't know if it helps this conversation at all but Steve Will just
blogged about SLS:
http://ibmsystemsmag.blogs.com/you_and_i/2009/08/
the-new-value-of-single-level-store.html

Hmmm, I wonder if he was reading this thread! As "IBM i Chief Architect", of course Steve Will is going to defend SLS!

Let's look at his two arguments: First, he looks at the ease of managing disks on the iSeries. I think he's making somewhat of a strawman argument here. Of course, disk management on IBM's mainframe systems is a real pain in comparison. But first, the same isn't necessarily true on other operating systems. And second, if you've spent 7 or 8 figures in your machine room, you can afford the necessary operators. (Contrary to all the obits over the years, there's still life in the z/Architecture!)

Second, he discusses how the iSeries automatically balances where things are stored on disk based on the relative speeds of the storage devices, looking at solid-state drives in particular. Sure, that's way cool! On the other hand, on a conventional O/S environment, I think I'd simply put the swap partition on the SSD device and enjoy the same performance benefit.

Cheers! Hans


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