IBM upgrades DS8000 with faster flash drives
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FLASH IBM upgrades DS8000 with faster flash drives IBM has upgraded its high-end DS8000 storage array to use the latest FCM5 FlashCore Modules, its proprietary SSDs, with speed and capacity increases over the prior FCM4s. IBM Storage product Marketing Manager Fabian Alejandro Ruelas blogs: “With the launch of IBM Storage DS8000 Release 10.2, IBM advances its flagship enterprise storage platform to align directly with C-suite imperatives. Built for IBM Z, IBM LinuxONE, and high-performance enterprise systems, Release 10.2 shifts the focus from simple capacity management to a platform that is inherently Always Manageable and Always Resilient.” He says Release 10.2 introduces the fifth-generation IBM FlashCore Module (FCM5) within the newly designed HPFE Gen 3 E3 enclosure, transforming storage economics across the data center. There is “up to 134 TB of provisionable capacity per drive.” By that he means that the drive has a logical addressing capability of up to 6.1 times its raw capacity, as an IBM Redbook FCM Product Guide specifies. Prior FCM4s used the PCIe gen 3 bus. Our IBMer says “back-end throughput and IOPS are doubled via NVMe over PCIe Gen 4, delivering immediate performance gains to cache-unfriendly, read-intensive business applications.” No performance numbers are revealed though. There are five FCM5 raw capacity points, according to a second IBM Redbook, and the in-built HW compression can provide an up 3x effective capacity increase. Combining data from the two Redbooks gives us this table: The 134 TB of provisionable capacity equates to a 26.4 TB Large FCM5 size, with a 79.2 TB compressed capacity; fairly small compared to off-the-shelf SSDs. Current maximum off-the-shelf SSD raw capacities are at the 245.8 TB level with, for example, Kioxia’s LC9 high-capacity QLC SSD, Micron’s 6600 ION and Sandisk’s UltraQLC SN670. When used in storage servers or arrays with controller-based compression, these could offer an up to 3x capacity increase as well, taking them to the 735 TB level. All these SSDs, including the FCM5, use QLC NAND. The FCM5 has an SLC zone for faster writes and reads with data tiered in the drive between the two zones. However, IBM has not revealed the FCM5’s random read and write IOPS nor its sequential read and write bandwidth, meaning no direct performance comparison is possible between it and the commercial SSDs. The FCM5 uses the PCIe gen 4 bus whereas Kioxia’s LC9 uses the twice-as-fast PCIe gen 5 bus, as does Micron’s 6600 ION and Sandisk’s SN670, so they will likely all be instantly faster than the FCM5. The drive has lots of built-in intelligence, such as HW compression, deduplication, die striping, and cyber-attack detection, implying its PCB area has space for the needed computation and memory requirements, with less space for NAND chips and hence lower raw capacity. IBM says that this offloading of computation from a host processor will make the overall system faster, but whether that can compensate for the PCIe 5 performance increase over PCIe 4 is a moot point. IBM’s HPFE Gen 3 enclosures are installed in pairs for full redundancy. Each pair occupies 4U of rack space and supports 16, 32, or 48 drives. These are populated in sets of 16 of the same capacity. Other points: - Native IBM Storage Insights connectivity provides unified monitoring across IBM DS8000, and SAN environments—enabling proactive health telemetry and reducing time-to-resolution for critical operational issues. - Release 10.2 provides real-time observability over power consumption and thermal performance, helping clients manage for reduced energy overhead per terabyte - Advanced zHyperLink performance statistics give administrators granular insight into core mainframe workloads, ensuring strict adherence to mission-critical SLAs and accelerating transactional throughput.Near Real-Time Threat Alerts: In-drive hardware AI continuously monitors I/O stream signatures for ransomware activity on CKD data, immediately notifying local operational channels and cloud-based IBM Technical Account Managers. - Automated Containment: Integrated Copy Services Manager (CSM) actions trigger the moment an attack is detected—slashing the critical window between initial breach and containment. - Guaranteed Recoverability: CSM now automates Type 1 (Infrastructure) validation to ensure operating environments restart cleanly from immutable Safeguarded Copies. Organizations can extend this protection to full data structure and content validation through IBM Z CyberVault and IBM Expert Labs Cyber Vault services. Our IBM blogger concludes: "IBM Storage DS8000 Release 10.2 bridges the gap between infrastructure engineering and executive priorities. By uniting high-density flash efficiency, single-view operational intelligence, and automated cyber defense, Release 10.2 provides the resilient foundation required to power modern, AI-driven enterprises with total confidence.” Read more about FCM5s here. Bootnote Count key data (CKD) is a track-based disk storage format and command set introduced by IBM in 1964 for mainframe direct-access storage devices.
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