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Intelligent Storage

New RAID controllers offer highly advanced and virtualized storage solutions for the System i platform

The IBM* System i* platform is regarded as one of the industry's most scalable servers for high-volume transaction workloads, which are typical in the commercial computing environment. This scalability is largely delivered through the self-optimizing IBM i5/OS* integrated storage-management architecture. The use of intelligent disk-storage adapters and the performance delivered by these adapters is critical to delivering the overall balanced performance.

System i intelligent disk-storage adapters have been called a number of names, such as RAID IOA, RAID IOP, RAID Controller, RAID Adapter, Storage IOA and Integrated Storage Adapter. Figure 1 shows the basic system building blocks and where the RAID controller fits in to this structure.

This set of intelligent storage adapters is further enhanced with the introduction of the new high-performance RAID controllers (5777 and 5778). In this article, we'll look closely at some of the innovations that are delivered with these intelligent storage adapters, typically not found in industry-standard RAID adapters.

By design, the intelligent storage adapters are architected with an end-to-end view. The entire storage-management hierarchy, from main storage cache to disk caches, is optimized, providing balanced performance throughput that's highly automated and managed by i5/OS.

Continuing from IBM System/38* architecture, i5/OS storage management has always implemented data striping (RAID 0), which automatically distributes the data access across multiple disk arms to optimize performance. Additionally, the intelligent storage adapters deliver a significant amount of intelligence and performance optimization. This article highlights some of the important attributes of these intelligent storage adapters that make the overall integrated storage-management solution on the System i platform world-class.

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