Re: can POWER6 IBM i or System i run on non-IBM disk drives?

[Charles Wilt <charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx>]

IMHO, no.

An application isn't going to see any difference.  The developer
writing the application isn't going to need to know the difference.

IBM could have chosen to completely "hide" the control of SSD usage
below the MI; but they didn't.  Instead, they surface a few functions
that allows for admins to set preferences on how the SSDs are used.

If I'm reading Bill's post right, IBM plans on releasing a PTF that
will enable the "automagical" movement of hot data to SSDs and cold
data off them.  Right now, the process has to be done manually using a
combination of STRASPTRC and STRASPBAL.
Once that PTF is available, you could benefit from simply adding SSDs
to a system without any additional work required.  Thank you SLS!

As I understand it, originally the 400 (S/36, S/38?) allowed only one
ASP.  All disk was part of that one ASP.  But it turned out that many
times there were considerable benefits to having more than one ASP.
So IBM surface some functionality to allow admins to place objects on
specific ASPs.

Theory, meet the real world!  :)

Also, the i's had some functionality related to hierarchical storage
management for a long time.  The SSDs are just enhancing that.

-Charles Wilt


On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Walden H. Leverich
<WaldenL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The concept of balancing data access for performance seems to fly in the face of single-level-store, no? Isn't a core concept behind SLS that the "higher-level" OS functions don't care about where on disk something is stored, it's all presented to anything above the TIMI as one gigantic memory space. If decisions on where to write data are being made based on knowledge of the underlying storage infrastructure haven't we poked some rather major holes in the MI layer?
>
> -Walden
>
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> Walden H Leverich III
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