We have upgraded a fair amount of our customers with older IBM Power Systems to IBM’s recently released Power8 systems. IBM has yet again made big strides in performance, reliability, and scalability within the system unit and the operating systems. Today I will not go into details about the performance specs or harp on the fact that IBM Power8 technology is an extremely reliable and scalable solution for the mid-market. If you’re looking for performance specs check out these quick comparisons between IBM Power7 and IBM Power8 S814
Power8 4U Comparison – S824 vs. Power7+ 740
Power8 Comparison – S814 vs. Power7+ 720
In this post I will focus specifically on the system unit disk capacity. In order to show you the benefits of Power8 we will start by looking at the IBM Power7+ 720 (8202-E4D) system unit. The Power 720 unit with the EJ01 backplane supports up to 8 SFF HDD’s in the system unit. For comparison purposes we will pack all the system units with 283gb 15k RPM SAS SFF-2 Disk Drives #FC1948 and dedicate 1 drive to Raid for every 8 HDD’s.
So looking at the specs for the Power7+ 8202-E4D system we can carry a total of 8 drive for a grand total of 1.98TB usable disk in the system unit itself.
Now we will take a look at the backplane on the recently released Power8 backplane EJ0P. This backplane is available on both the S814 and S824 models. With the EJ0P backplane the system unit has a total of 18 available disk drives in the system unit. Based on our rule that for every 8 drives we need one additional drive for raid the system unit has a total usable disk capacity of 4.024TB. The below image shows a rough layout of the disk configured on the EJ0P backplane.
The EJ0P backplane in the new Power8 S814 and S824 system units can handle 2x the storage that the previous Power7+ models can.
This is a great thing but what does this mean for the typical mid-market customer?
As we started configuring systems for our midsized customers we started to realize how many of our customers fall into the 1.5tb to 3.25tb range. In the previous Power7+ world these customers would have had to purchase an additional 5887 drawer to handle their disk needs. Additional hardware results in additional upfront costs, ongoing maintenance costs, and additional real-estate in your datacenter. So while we love our 5887 drawer we also love saving our customer’s time and money!
Send me an email if you would like more information or would like to get some pricing on IBM’s new Power8 systems.
Leave a Reply