i:ASP Data Balancer and IBM's iSeries servers

IBM is continuing its push into SSDs (solid-state drives), announcing flash drives for server and storage platforms as well as new software for allocating data among different types of drives.

Enterprise SSDs allow for faster access to data but cost far more, per bit, than spinning HDDs (hard disk drives). IBM is clearly committed to the emerging technology, as are EMC and other enterprise storage vendors. IBM, though, doesn't believe SSDs will make up more than 5 percent of any average company's total storage capacity.

For the foreseeable future, SSDs will be used as part of tiered storage architectures alongside HDDs, said Charlie Andrews, director of marketing in IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure group. For that reason, the company offers a variety of software to help store "hot" data in SSDs and "cold" data on HDDs. Its latest announcement, the IBM i:ASP Data Balancer, automatically shifts different bits of data to the most appropriate tier in a storage system. The software uses an algorithm that draws upon information such as how often each bit of data has been used, Andrews said. The i:ASP Data Balancer is designed for IBM's iSeries servers, part of the company's Power
line.

From http://www.macvideo.tv/editing/news/index.cfm?newsId=116293&pagType=samechandate

IBM ships SSDs for Power Systems - Unix, Linux, and i5/os

IBM today begins selling its first solid state disks for its Power Systems boxes, the machines it uses to attack the Unix, Linux, and OS/400 installed bases.

The IBM SSD, which comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, has about 220 MB/sec of sustained throughput on reads and about 122 MB/sec of sustained throughput on writes and can perform about 28,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) on random transactional processing. The SSD has a 3 Gb/sec SAS interface and has an average access time of from 20 to 120 microseconds, the difference depending on where data is located on the SSD. According to IBM's specs, the SSD has about 87 times the I/O operations per second of a 15K RPM SAS drive and yet consumes about one-fifth of the power

Timothy Prickett Morgan in The Register

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/22/ibm_power_ssds/