IBM Announces DS8000 Enterprise Storage Gen 10

Laura Tuller
Senior Systems Engineer
Cyber Storage Solutions & Sustainability SW

DS8000 Gen10 bolsters security, enhances connectivity, increases speed, adds compression with FCM4 technology.

Prefer to watch a video? Click here

Ladies and gentlemen, a drum roll please, for the first time ever there’s a trickle up in technology from IBM FlashSystems to IBM DS8000. Announced today and generally available in Q4 of this year, IBM is coming out with DS8000 G10 (generation 10!). I’m going to leave you hanging to read through the basic refresh updates and leave what I think is the most exciting for last (I see you folks skipping till the end because you can’t wait).

Rock Solid and Resilient

Rock solid and as resilient as ever, the G10 boasts 8-9’s of availability, multi-site replication, and advanced data protection. It also adds Secure boot and FIPS 140-3 certification to the AES-256-bit encryption that already existed along with cryptographic erasure and Secure Data Overwrite. Another leap in connectivity is up to 50% latency reduction with NVMe and PCIe Gen4 compared to the old SAS 6Gb and PCIe gen 3. There’s also been cleanup of custom hardware and firmware from previous generations, so this also contributed to improved simplicity and reliability of the DS8000 G10.

New 3-layer Architecture

G10 is built on a new 3-layer shared everything architecture. Level 1 is securely delivering data to your applications which includes Fibre Channel Endpoint Security that IBM Z has signaled it will require for all new storage systems beginning with zNext+1. Layer 2 hosts the Power 9+ controllers (with up to a whopping 4.8 TB of system memory). The expanded system memory and write cache improve your hit rate on cache friendly workloads and give a bump of speed to background operations such as Safeguarded Copy and replication. There are also new I/O bays that have been consolidated into 3u of rack space and house 4 host adapters, 2 device adapters, 2 zHyperLink adapters and controller connections. Researchers and developers at IBM who work on IBM Z and the IBM Storage DS8000 family have been co-creating for almost 20 years and the integration between the two systems continues to run deep. This leads us to the enhancements of zHyperLink, which is the lightning-fast direct connection of IBM Z and DS8000 that allow some applications to sidestep the SAN. In the past users saw up to a 35% reduction in time elapsed for DB2, but now with PCIe Gen4 and other secret sauce software enhancements on IBM Z, you can almost triple throughput while reducing latency down to 16 microseconds. If that wasn’t enough, there’s also broader software support for more applications on IBM Z. Layer 3 is management of internal flash including the software RAID stack and the highly anticipated inclusion of FlashCore Modules. The drives available include Performance 1.6TB Industry Standard NVMe Flash, Capacity rated 1.9TB, 3.8TB, 7.6TB Industry Standard NVMe Flash and Compression enabled 4.8TB, 9.6TB, 19.2TB IBM FlashCore Module (FCM 4).

FlashCore Module 4 (FCM4)

For those unfamiliar with FCM4, it’s 4th generation IBM proprietary flash drives utilized in the IBM FlashSystem family for generations with all the smarts built into the hardware in FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) to make performance hits for compression obsolete. When choosing FCM media, data is compressed by LZ77 + Dynamic Huffman Encoding on 16K Byte Blocks. Compression is huge because it’s never been offered on the DS8000 before and IBM i along with open systems users can see good savings (up to 3:1). In an IBM Z environment, there are lots of ways to compress data (which can’t be compressed more) such as dataset compression with a DFSMS Data Class, application compression like Db2, or zEDC. Even so, client survey results suggest there is still lots of compressible data that isn’t yet being compressed. That’s where DS8000 G10 compression may be able to help. Compression plus thin provisioning and denser drives equates to more capacity in a single rack. Plus, there’s been a bump to max large and small extents. (I’ve had more than one customer run into issues with those previous ceilings, so I’m very happy about this bump.)

Racks (or not), Frames, and Follow-ons

The DS8910 (racked with no expansions) is followed on by the DS8A10 and the DS8950 (multi-frame) is followed on by the DS8A50. I’d be on the lookout for the DS8910F (rackless) and the DS8980F along with in-line threat detection utilizing the FCM4s to be announced in 2025. I’m a bit disappointed it’s not out immediately, but it’s certainly worth the wait (and if you purchase a DS8000 G10 in 2024 you’ll still get it as part of a code upgrade in 2025).

Watch the DS8000 G10 Video

Enterprise Storage and Data Solutions from Mainline

Mainline offers cyber storage solutions that increase workload efficiency of today’s data intensive enterprises. As a Platinum level IBM Business Partner, the highest partnership level in the IBM PartnerWorld program, and having deep knowledge across the entire spectrum of enterprise storage solutions, we help our clients select and acquire the best offerings to suit their business needs and budget.

Our experts can assist you from the initial assessment through post-implementation support to include services that can help you maximize and sustain business efficiencies. Contact your Mainline Account Representative directly or reach out to us here with any questions.