Lenovo Storage D1224 Drive Enclosures

Figure 3. Lenovo Storage D1224 Drive Enclosure

Lenovo Storage D1224 Drive Enclosures have the following key features:

• 2U rack mount enclosure with 12 Gbps SAS direct-attached storage connectivity, designed to provide simplicity, speed, scalability, security, and high availability
• Holds 24x 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) drives
• Dual Environmental Service Module (ESM) configurations for high availability and performance
• Flexibility in storing data on high performance SAS SSDs, performance-optimized enterprise SAS HDDs, or capacity-optimized enterprise NL SAS HDDs; mixing and matching drive types and form factors on a single RAID adapter or HBA to perfectly meet performance and capacity requirements for various workloads
• Support multiple host attachments and SAS zoning for storage partitioning

For more information about the Lenovo Storage D1224 Drive Enclosure, see the Lenovo Press product guide: https://lenovopress.com/lp0512

The following figure show the D3284 drive expansion enclosure with the lower drawer open.

Figure 5. Front view of the D3284 drive enclosure

For more information about the Lenovo Storage Drive Expansion Enclosure, see the Lenovo Press product guide: https://lenovopress.com/lp0513

Infrastructure and rack installation

The solution arrives at the customer location installed in the Lenovo 1410 Rack, tested, components and cables labeled and ready to deploy for quick productivity.

• Factory-integrated, pre-configured ready-to-go solution that is delivered in a rack with all the hardware you need for your workloads: servers, storage, and network switches, plus essential software tools.
• IBM Spectrum Scale software is preinstalled on all servers.
• Optional x3550 M5 server and RackSwitch G7028 Gigabit Ethernet switch for xCAT cluster administration software and to act as the Spectrum Scale quorum.
• Designed for effortless integration into existing infrastructures, thereby reducing deployment time and saving money.
• Lenovo deployment services are available with the solution help get customers up and running quickly by allowing to begin deploying workloads in hours — not weeks — and realize substantial savings.
• Available Lenovo RackSwitch switches for a management network deliver exceptional performance and low latency, along with cost savings, and are designed to perform seamlessly with other vendors’ upstream switches.
• All the components of the solution are available through Lenovo, which provides a single point of entry for all support issues that you might encounter with the server, networking, storage, and software used in the solution, for quicker problem determination and minimized downtime.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 servers

Figure 6. Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 servers

Lenovo System SR650 servers have the following key features needed for the DSS-G100 base configuration:

• The SR650 server features a unique AnyBay design that allows a choice of drive interface types in the same drive bay: SAS drives, SATA drives, or U.2 NVMe PCIe drives.
• The SR650 server offers onboard NVMe PCIe ports that allow direct connections to the U.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs, which frees up I/O slots and helps lower NVMe solution acquisition costs.  DSS-G100 utilizes the NVMe drives
• The SR650 server delivers impressive compute power per watt, featuring 80 PLUS Titanium and Platinum redundant power supplies that can deliver 96% (Titanium) or 94% (Platinum) efficiency at 50% load when     connected to a 200 – 240 V AC power source.
• The SR650 server is designed to meet ASHRAE A4 standards (up to 45 °C or 113 °F) in select configurations, which enable customers to lower energy costs, while still maintaining world-class reliability.
• The SR650 server offers numerous features to boost performance, improve scalability, and reduce costs:
• Improves productivity by offering superior system performance with the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family with up to 28-core processors, up to 38.5 MB of last level cache (LLC), up to 2666 MHz memory speeds, and up to 10.4 GT/s Ultra Path Interconnect (UPI) links.
• Support for up to two processors, 56 cores, and 112 threads allows to maximize the concurrent execution of multithreaded applications.
• Intelligent and adaptive system performance with energy efficient Intel Turbo Boost 2.0 Technology allows CPU cores to run at maximum speeds during peak workloads by temporarily going beyond processor thermal design power (TDP).
• Intel Hyper-Threading Technology boosts performance for multithreaded applications by enabling simultaneous multithreading within each processor core, up to two threads per core.
• Intel Virtualization Technology integrates hardware-level virtualization hooks that allow operating system vendors to better utilize the hardware for virtualization workloads.
• Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) enable acceleration of enterprise-class and high performance computing (HPC) workloads.
• Helps maximize system performance for data intensive applications with up to 2666 MHz memory speeds and up to 1.5 TB of memory capacity (support for up to 3 TB is planned for the future).
• Offers flexible and scalable internal storage in a 2U rack form factor with up to 24x 2.5-inch drives for performance-optimized configurations or up to 14x 3.5-inch drives for capacity-optimized configurations, providing a wide selection of SAS/SATA HDD/SSD and PCIe NVMe SSD types and capacities.
• Provides flexibility to use SAS, SATA, or NVMe PCIe drives in the same drive bays with a unique AnyBay design.
• Provides I/O scalability with the LOM slot, PCIe 3.0 slot for an internal storage controller, and up to six PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 I/O expansion slots in a 2U rack form factor.
• Reduces I/O latency and increases overall system performance with Intel Integrated I/O Technology that embeds the PCI Express 3.0 controller into the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family.

IBM Spectrum Scale, the follow-on to IBM GPFS, is a high-performance solution for managing data at scale with the distinctive ability to perform archive and analytics in place.

IBM Spectrum Scale has the following features:

• Uses Declustered RAID, where data and parity information as well as Spare Capacity is distributed across all disks
• Rebuilds with Declustered RAID are faster:
  • Traditional RAID would have one LUN fully busy resulting in slow rebuild and high impact overall
  • Declustered RAID rebuild activity spreads the load across many disks resulting in faster rebuild and less disruption to user programs
  • Declustered RAID minimizes critical data exposed to data loss in case of a second failure.
• 2-fault / 3-fault tolerance and mirroring: 2- or 3-fault-tolerant Reed-Solomon parity encoding as well as 3- or 4-way mirroring provides data integrity, reliability and flexibility
• End-to-end checksum:
  • Helps detect and correct off-track I/O and dropped writes
  • Disk surface to GPFS user/client provides information to help detect and correct write or I/O errors
• Disk hospital – asynchronous, global error diagnosis:
  • If there is a media error, information provided helps in verifying and restoring a media error.
  • If there is a path problem, information can be used to attempt alternate paths.
  • Disk tracking information helps track disk service times, which is useful in finding slow disks so they can be replaced.
• Multipathing: Performed automatically by Spectrum Scale, so no multipath driver is needed.
• Supports a variety of file I/O protocols:
  • POSIX, GPFS, NFS v4.0, SMB v3.0
  • Big data and analytics: Hadoop MapReduce
  • Cloud: OpenStack Cinder (block), OpenStack Swift (object), S3 (object)
• Supports cloud object storage:
  • IBM Cloud Storage System (Cleversafe)
  • Amazon S3
  • IBM SoftLayer Native Object
  • OpenStack Swift
  • Amazon S3 compatible providers

Lenovo DSS-G supports two editions of IBM Spectrum Scale, RAID Standard Edition and Data Management Edition. A comparison of these two editions is shown in the following table.