RE: VIOS disk evolution

A couple additional points.
For LPAR’d systems I have not see a configuration that external storage was not less expensive.
For system with one or two LPARs, you can use external storage without Fibre switches which helps reduce cost. This also works on the 4-core systems which do not allow expansion drawers.
For customers stuck on v7r1, IBM will continue to provide HW/SW support on S922 with special feature code for v7r1 support. VIOS and external storage is required for this support.

I am in the process of migrating a new customer from I hosting I with internal storage to external storage. They were seeing disk response times of over 50ms at times. Now this peaks at less than 5ms and normally runs less than 1ms.



From: Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis<mailto:midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2022 8:46 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion<mailto:midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; Rob Berendt<mailto:rob@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: VIOS disk evolution

There is a line on cost relating to total disk needed. Below x amount of
disk, internal is cheaper. Then they approach parity and above y amount
of disk external is cheaper.

Also consider that your IBM i host partition is consuming IBM i Licensed
CPU and significant memory. Compare to VIOS which runs in other cores
and uses less memory. And with POWERVM now 'no additional charge' there
is actually a cost savings with VIOS over IBM i as a host.

Then you add in the flexibility that SAN provides and rapidly it becomes
the goto choice.

As I said, once you got SAN you simply don't go back.

- L

On 5/13/2022 7:10 AM, Rob Berendt wrote:

We looked at SAN a few years ago. We deemed it prohibitively expensive. As of now the only SANs we have support our vmware environment. So there is some familiarity with flash copy, etc.

Rob Berendt

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IBM Champion for Power Systems