Datasheet

Ultrascalability combined with extreme availability
features and industry-leading performance
Please see the Legal Information section for important notices and information.
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Flexible Internal Storage Capacity
The eX5 servers offer a choice of internal storage, supporting up to eight (2.5-inch) hot-swap
Serial-Attach SCSI (SAS) or Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drives, or up to sixteen 1.8-inch
solid-state drives (SSDs) per chassis (using the IBM eXFlash option).
2.5-inch SAS
• 7,200 RPMs — 500GB (4.0TB maximum per chassis; 8TB in a 2-chassis configuration)
• 10,000 RPMs — 73.4, 146.8, or 300GB (2.4TB per chassis; 4.8TB per 2-chassis)
• 15,000 RPMs — 73.4 or 146.8GB (1.174TB per chassis; 2.35TB per 2 chassis)
2.5-inch SATA
• 7,200 RPMs — 160 or 500GB (4.0TB)
1.8-inch SSD
• 50GB (800GB per chassis)
• 200GB (3.2TB per chassis – 4Q/10)
o High I/O Performance
– Offers up to 8X more IOPS than HDDs (67/33% read/write OLTP transaction base
mix);
– Optimized for heavy mix of read and write operations, such as transaction processing,
media streaming, surveillance, file copy, logging, backup / recovery, and business
Intelligence
o Lower-Cost IOPS Performance
– Yields better $/IOPS: lower capacity (GB) required to achieve higher IOPS
– Consumes less energy and produces less heat than a conventional disk drive
o Superior Uptime
– 3X the reliability of mechanical disk drives
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– No moving parts to fail
– Enterprise wear-leveling to extend life even further
o Full OS Support
– Supports all ServerProven
®
OSes
High IOPS SSD PCIe Adapters
o IBM 160GB High IOPS SS Class SSD PCIe Adapter (x4 Gen 1—100K IOPS, 750MBps)
o IBM 320GB High IOPS SS Class SSD PCIe Adapter (x4 Gen 1—100K IOPS, 750MBps)
o IBM 320GB High IOPS MS Class SSD PCIe Adapter (x4 Gen 1—100K IOPS, 750MBps)
o IBM 320GB High IOPS SD Class SSD PCIe Adapter (x8 Gen 2—200K IOPS, 1.5GBps)
o IBM 640GB High IOPS MLC Duo Adapter (x8 Gen 2—200K IOPS, 1.5GBps)
For read-intensive transactional workloads requiring extreme IOPS performance, such as
database, video-on-demand, and caching, IBM offers High IOPS SSD PCIe Adapters,
equivalent to the IOPS output of approximately 500
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3.5-inch 600GB 15K SAS HDDs, with 99%
lower latency (30 µs), and 7.7x the bandwidth of a HDD. On a performance-per-watt basis,
these adapters outperform HDDs by up to 445x
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.
Because these adapters go in PCIe slots, rather than drive bays, they can be used in addition to
standard HDDs and SSDs. This makes them ideal for virtualized servers running multiple tasks,
requiring both write- and read-intensive storage media. As flash media they also offer a
predictable lifetime, compared to the sporadic failure rate of HDDs, using N+1 chip-level
redundancy and 11-bit ECC protection.
If you need more storage space, terabyte capacities are possible with external direct-attach
NAS and SAN solutions.
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Approximately 3,000,000 hours MTBF for SSDs vs. approximately 1,000,000 hours for enterprise 3.5-inch 15K SAS HDDs.
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According to internal IBM testing, the typical maximum IOPS of a 600GB 15K 3.5-inch hot-swap SAS HDD is ~400 (4K random
reads), while the typical IOPS of a 640GB High IOPS SSD PCIe adapter is ~200,000, or ~500x. The typical bandwidth of the
same HDD = ~195MBps (64K sequential reads), while the typical bandwidth of a 640GB High IOPS MLC adapter is ~1.5GBps, or
~7.7x.
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97,014 IOPS / 9W = 10,779 IOPS per watt (160GB/320GB adapters). 196,000 IOPS / 12W = 16,333 IOPS per watt (640GB
adapters). 400 IOPS / 16.5W = 24.2 IOPS per watt (600GB 15K 3.5-inch hot-swap SAS HDD).