IBM Preps Delivery of 10th-Gen DS8000 Array

October 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

IBM is gearing up to begin delivery of the tenth generation of the DS8000, its high-end storage arrays for IBM i, AIX, z/OS, and other servers. Due to ship October 25, the upgraded DS8000 features a number of features designed to enhance data storage in z/OS mainframe environments, but IBM i shops will also see some benefits, too.

Now in its 20th year, the DS8000 still roams the highest echelons of storage area networks (SAN) for large enterprises. Built with high availability and performance in mind, the DS8000 is designed to power the most important applications for the biggest companies in the world.

The 10th edition of the DS8000 brings several general enhancements that benefit all customers and a handful of features designed specifically for the System Z mainframe.

Generally speaking, the upgrade from PCI Gen3 to PCI Gen4 will provide about double the internal bandwidth compared to the previous version, IBM says. Customers can use this speedup to either double the I/O throughput or to reduce the number of controllers in the I/O bay, IBM says.

IBM has also bumped up the size of the write cache of the Power9 processors used in the DS8000. Previously, the write cache was 128GB for the DS8950F model, and with the new generation, it’s 192GB (for the 3584 GB A05 configuration, which is a comparable model).

The DS8000 sports a new 3U I/O bay that supports 8 PCIe adapter slots. IBM outfits these slots with four host adapters, two HPFE (High-Performance Flash Enclosure) RAID adapters, and two zHyperlink adapters. IBM notes that the HPFE RAID adapters and zHyperlink adapters are also new.

zHyperlink, as you may have guessed, is a System Z-only data transfer technology. The proprietary Fibre Channel-based protocol can deliver up to 10 times lower latency than FICON, the proprietary FC-based protocol that it replaces. The performance increases can be traced to support for PCI Gen4. IBM also notes the default maximum read size has increased to 16 KB (although that can be bumped up to 32 KB in z/OS if needed).

On the storage front, IBM says the new third generation HPFE it built for the 10th-gen DS8000 comes with a new RAID adapter that offers better performance, with support for RAID6 and RAID10. The performance of the RAID data striping is better due to IBM moving it from the ASIC used in the HPFE Gen2 to a dedicated processors within the RAID adapter in HPFE Gen3.

IBM supports seven industry-standard 2.5-inch NVMe drives and FlashCore modules. The supported NVMe drives offer storage capacities of 1.6TB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB, and 7.68TB, while the FlashCore Module come in 4.8TB, 9.6TB, and 19.2 TB sizes.

IBM will be shipping two models to start. The DS8A10 is a single frame rack-mounted storage system that replaces the DS8910F, while the DS8A50 is a multi-frame rack-mounted storage system that replaces the DS8950F.

The DS8A10 offers a single 10-core Power9 processor per node, for a total of 20 nodes per system. It can be outfitted with 256GB to 512GB of system memory, and support up to 192 NVMe drives and four HPFE Gen3 enclosure pairs. It sports up to 16 host port adapters providing 64 ports, including up to four zHyperlink adapters.

The DS8A50 offers two 10-core Power9 processors per node, for a total of 40 nodes per system. It can be outfitted with 1TB, 2TB, or 3.5TB of system memory, and support up to 192 NVMe drives and four HPFE Gen3 enclosure pairs. It also sports up to 16 host port adapters providing 64 ports, including up to eight zHyperlink adapters.

Customers with even more data to store can expand their DS8000 installation with Model E05 expansion frames. Each Model E05 can be attached to a DS8A50 multiframe system to provide up to 192 additional NVMe drives and four HPFE Gen3 enclosure pairs, for a total of 384 Flash drives and eight HPFE Gen3 enclosure pairs. It can support up to 16 additional host adapters providing 64 ports for a total of 32 host adapters and 128 ports per system, IBM says. Mainframers can opt for eight additional zHyperlink adapters with a maximum of 10 zHyperlink ports per system.

Total storage capacity has effectively doubled with the 10th gen arrays. The maximum usable capacity on the A10 has gone from 512 tebibytes (TiB) to 1 pedibyte (PiB), IBM says, while the max capacity on the A50 has gone from 1 PiB to 2 PiB. (TiB and PiB refer to storage capacities using the binary multiple, whereas TB and PB uses the decimal multiple. One TiB equals 1.099 trillion bytes, while one PiB equals 1.12 quadrillion bytes. As the big data boom continues, the difference between binary and decimal standards grows too big to ignore, so get used to seeing the new nomenclature.)

IBM says the 10th generation DS8000 can deliver eight-nines of reliability, which corresponds with about 0.3 seconds of downtime per nine. That’s an improvement from the five-nines of reliability (99.999 percent uptime, or 5.26 minutes of downtime per year) that IBM previously touted.

However, that 99.999999 uptime rating is applicable only to a DS8000 connected to an IBM z15 or z16 mainframe equipped with z/OS Parallel Simplex, Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) HyperSwap Manager, and GDPS Continuous Availability, among other IBM middleware components. While IBM didn’t provide an uptime estimate for IBM i, one would expect that it has been improved, too.

The mainframe folks also benefit from some additional compression technology that IBM has incorporated into the DS8000, specifically through the FlashCore Modules. IBM says the on-board compression from ARM processors in the FlashCore Modules works with count key data (CKD) as well as fixed block (FB) data. On the security front, IBM said it plans to require the use of Fibre Channel Endpoint Security for all FICON connected devices starting with IBM zNext+1 (the next major release of the mainframe OS).

You can read the September 10 IBM hardware announcement for the DS8000 here.

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