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.pdf
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/
midrange.com
