IBM NVMe Remote Storage Drawer NED24 "First Look"
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- Опубліковано 30 січ 2025
- 1) Remote I/O (Storage) drawer is 19 inches by 2U. Where "remote" means the Power10 server has this unit attached via PCIe cables but it operates much like the internal NVMe disks are part of the server itself.
2) Up to 24 NVMe drives - drives used are very similar to those in Power10 with these sizes: 800 GB, 1.6 TB, 3.2 TB and 6.4 TB.
3) Each drive is separately assignable to a different virtual machine (LPAR) and bootable for AIX, VIOS, Linux, and IBM i.
4) Connected to Power10 servers with new high-speed cables & adapters.
5) Power10 Adapter PCIe gen 4 for higher bandwidth & higher I/O operations per second.
6) Two cable pairs - copper or optical.
7) Low electricity power requirements.
8) Lower cost per GB compared to the previous SAS drawer.
9) 154 TB of storage per NED24 Drawer
10) 1.2 PB data when you attach eight NED24 to a Power10 model E1080.
Note on the pre-reqs:
NED24 requires Power10 System Firmware FW1040 and the matching HMC software 10.2.1040.
Direct attached to IBM i is not supported until FW1050, which looking at the history I suggest maybe later in 2023. This is my guess and not an announcement.
Upgrading from FW1040 to FW1050 will require a server outage.
More: Support info on FW1040 - www.ibm.com/su...
More: Support notes on FW release schedule - www.ibm.com/su...
Update:
Good News 2024. Multipathing is now available to the NED24 see: IBM TechXchange article here: community.ibm....
Excellent content!
have a significant level of performance copper VS optical? the speed of the optical cables is more than 32 gb?
Both cables allow the drives to operate at their maximum speed. I have no performance stats to help you decide. User can decide but copper is less expensive. Perhaps, a later versions of this drawer will make it clearer. Like the optical cables allows for better configurations of multiple drawers. That is my guess and I have no details of future offerings nor dates.
very beautiful video and content is so interesting with lots of details
Can you use namespaces in the NED24 drawers ?
Hi, I do not know - you will have to ask your IBM representative. I don't under stand the need to cut large drives in to smaller chucks at such a low level as it increases system admin workloads. If you must then you could connect the NVMe to your VIOS and cut up the space at the VIOS LVM level - this would then allow VIOS access for example backups and cloning the space. You then assign the space to a VM using VSCSI. Let me know your thoughts.
Article on Multipathing to the NED24 on IBM TechXchange community:
community.ibm.com/community/user/power/blogs/harsha-kotapati/2024/08/08/multipath-io-capability-support-for-nvme-devices-i
Clearly a lot of thought went into the design of this. Performance, redundancy and even little details such as the grounding points.
excelent, the mirror of ibmi i not have idea how is working y these remote storage
You will need to talk to and IBM i expert.
For AIX you would the create two virtual disks and hand them to AIX to do the mirroring. To be safe from a NED24 failure, you would need two NED24 devices and have one virtual disk on each NED24.
thanks for the video
The 64 thousand dollar question:
storage or NED24?
why always discriminate and leave the IBMi last?
I have no real idea. I would guess, IBM i has a more complex and clever storage model that many requires lengthy testing!