IBM POWER 730 - Manual (Page 30)

IBM Europe, Middle East, and Africa Hardware
Announcement ZG10-0214
IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation 30
Notes:
– Features 1995 and 1996 require feature 2053.
– When feature 2145, IBM i operating system, is selected, a minimum of two
HDD/SSD is required.
– No internal HDD/SSD is required if feature 0837 (Boot from SAN) is selected.
In this case, a Fibre Channel or Fibre Channel over Ethernet adapter must also
be ordered.
• Power 710 requires one 1725 watt AC Power Supply (1 x #5603) and one power
cord (1 x #6xxx); Power 730 requires two 1725 watt AC Power Supplies (2 x
#5603) and two power cords (2 x #6xxx).
• Choose chassis type from:
– Power 710 requires one processor chassis (#7317).
– Power 730 requires two processor chassis (#7318).
• Choose Primary Operating System Indicator from:
– IBM i (#2145 -- requires #0566 or #0567, #5550 or #5553, #5762, and
#0040)
– AIX (#2146)
– Linux (#2147)
Note: One nonfeaturized memory riser card is included in the base system. One
additional memory riser card feature (#5265) can be ordered on the Power 710.
Three additional memory riser card features (#5265) can be ordered on the Power
730.
RAID
There are multiple protection options for HDD/SSD drives in the SAS SFF bays
in Power 710 and Power 730 system units or drives in disk-only I/O drawers.
Although protecting drives is always recommended, AIX/Linux users may choose
to leave some or all drives unprotected at their own risk and IBM supports these
configurations. IBM i configuration rules differ in this regard, and IBM supports IBM i
partition configurations only when HDD/SSD drives are protected.
This HDD/SSD drive protection can be provided by AIX/IBM i/Linux software or by
the HDD/SSD hardware controllers. Mirroring of drives is provided by AIX/IBM i/
Linux software. In addition, AIX/Linux supports controllers providing RAID 0, 1, 5,
6, or 10. IBM i integrated storage management already provides striping, so IBM
i also supports controllers providing RAID 5 or 6. To further augment HDD/SSD
protection, hot spare capability can be used for protected drives. Specific hot spare
prerequisites apply.
An integrated SAS HDD/SSD controller is provided in the Power 710 and Power
730 system units and provides support for JBOD and RAID 0 for AIX or Linux. It
is optionally augmented by RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10 capability when feature
5268 is added to the configuration. In addition to these protection options, mirroring
of drives by the operating system is supported. AIX or Linux supports all of these
options. IBM i does not use JBOD and uses imbedded functions instead of RAID 10,
but does leverage the RAID 5 or 6 function of the integrated controllers. Other disk/
SSD controllers are provided as PCIe SAS adapters are supported. PCI Controllers
with and without write cache are supported. RAID 5 and RAID 6 on controllers with
write cache are supported.
AIX/Linux can use disk drives formatted with 512 byte blocks when being mirrored
by the operating system. These disk drives must be reformatted to 528 byte sectors
when used in RAID arrays. Although a small percentage of the drive's capacity is
lost, additional data protection such as ECC and bad block detection is gained in
this reformatting. For example, a 300 GB disk drive when reformatted provides
around 283 GB. IBM i always uses drives formatted to 528 byte. IBM Power SSDs
are formatted to 528 byte.