IBM i 6.1.1 hit the streets last week as Big Blue announced support for an expanded range of storage hardware, a mid-price SAS disk controller, new VIOS options, solid-sate disk enhancements and more.

Some new features simply bring the i up to speed with its AIX counterpart. However, the mini-release of OS i and the other announcements that went with it have been received fairly well by industry insiders. One highlight, according to Power Consulting [2]'s Richard Field, is a new mid-size (and therefore mid-price) 380MB Cache SAS Disk Controller for 12X PCIe I/O drawers and Power6 system units.

He says: "Previously, the choice for a disk adapter for the latest SAS disk drives, standard in the Power6/6+ servers and widely adopted in expansion unit disks too, was either a controller intended to support external SAS Tape which did not contain the cache to drive disks adequately, or the 'jumbo-cache' disk controllers which are over the top for many small to mid-size installations and also are very expensive -- £10,000-plus.

"The new adapter fits between these two, containing enough cache to drive a moderate disk workload but is a more reasonable price -- under £3,000. It can support standard size and small form factor hard disk drives or solid state disk. Also of note, the new card utilises PCIe architecture which is now becoming standard in the latest generation of expansion tower, replacing PCI-X, the new design being cheaper to manufacture."

New direct Fibre Channel support for IBM's DS5100 and DS5300 storage devices is also welcome, says Qcubed [3]'s Glenn Robinson.

"The DS5000 is a relatively new offering from IBM and will replace the DS4000 range of SANS," he explains. "As well as providing improved performance and pricing, the DS5000 range can expect to see some new functionality in 2010; thin provisioning, for example. As IBM i and its predecessors all have DB2 at the heart of the system, it is vitally important that customers are able to leverage the systems' strengths without the dependency on internal storage. The industry has already taken SAN technology to its bosom so it is essential that Power i is part of the benefits which can be attained from external storage."

In 6.1.1, partitions can now be configured in multipath configurations where one partition uses redundant VIOS partitions to connect to the same storage device. Partitions also now support N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), providing enhanced support for a wider range of storage systems. IBM says that NPIV provides better backup support in VIOS configurations for Fibre Channel tape libraries.

Robinson says: "In most AIX/Linux environments using Power Systems, a single VIOS LPAR is considered a single point of failure. If the VIOS 'owns' fibre storage controllers, which are then presented to the AIX, IBM i and/or Power Linux partitions, the failure of the VIOS will mean the other LPARs will lose their path to the storage.

"To provide VIOS resiliency, it is commonplace to configure two VIOS partitions on the system, each owning fibre, SCSI and Ethernet adapters. By allocating the redundant physical hardware between the two VIOS LPARs it is possible to provide the AIX, IBM i and Power Linux LPARs with redundant paths to the physical hardware. To date, IBM i has not been able to utilise redundant VIOS LPARs. This announcement brings this feature to IBM i at V6R1.1."

The new OS release beefs up the performance of the data balancer for the i's recently introduced solid sate disks along with new system data placement and SSD-aware utilities. IBM i 6.1.1 environments can also use SSDs in PowerVM VIOS and storage configurations. IBM has also released a downloadable SSD Analyzer tool that runs on OS i 5.4 or 6.1 that determines if SSDs can help improve application performance.

"IBM has been open in saying SSDs are not right for everyone and has provided the Analyzer Tool to allow one to check an environment out for suitability," says Field. "IBM has also provided some statistics from a customer who has adopted a mixed HDD/SSD solution and seen great improvements. It seems that SSDs have a place where disk I/O is very heavy on a smaller number of objects that can be located on SSD for best performance, with normal disk for normal data.

"The enhancements to the storage manager that allows the ASP trace and balance functionality to automatically relocate onto SSD the data that will elicit the most benefit is good news. The price for SSDs will no doubt come down over time, and they will probably grow too, so expect to see a slow and but steady implementation. Sticking my neck out and fully expecting to be completely wrong, I reckon we may see the first configuration ship with only SSDs within twelve to eighteen months."

You can read the full set of new i announcements, as reported last week by my System i Network colleague Chris Maxcer, here [4]. Upgrades to IBM i 6.1.1 are available for Power Systems and System i 5xx series and iSeries 8xx range of machines and can be upgraded from as far back as OS/400 V5R3.