IBM POWER9 machines are awesome. POWER9 is an engineering marvel that offers integration with Watson through Bluemix, as well as providing machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that can catapult any organization into the future.
But did you know that IBM i 7.4 utilizes several POWER9 features that have premiered on IBM i now that the new OS is here? These features are only available on i 7.4 running on POWER9. You can’t use them with i 7.3 or 7.2.
Here are the POWER9 hardware features that have become available with IBM i 7.4.
Doubling the Cores Per Partition with POWER9 and i 7.4
Running in eight-way Simultaneous Multithreading mode (SMT8), IBM i 7.3 on POWER9 supports up to 96 cores per partition running a maximum of 768 threads. IBM i 7.4 running on POWER9 doubles the i 7.3 numbers by supporting up to 192 cores per partition running a maximum of 1536 threads. A 200% increase.
Auxiliary Storage Pool disk arm increases
IBM also announced POWER9 disk arm increases to help i 7.4 performance. Generally, the more active arms you have on an IBM i system, the better your disk retrieval process.
In i 7.4 running on POWER9, IBM increased the maximum number of disk arms that can be supported in all basic auxiliary storage pools (ASPs) on a single partition (ASPs 1-32). i 7.4 can now support up to 3999 disk arms, a 195.3% increase over the 2047 disk arms that were supported in all ASPs on IBM i 7.3.
For independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs 33 – 255) in all nodes in a cluster, IBM has increased the number of disk arms in iASPs (iASP 33-255) from 2047 arms in i 7.3 up to 5999 arms in i 7.4. An increase of 293%.
Larger Maximum LUN sizes and IBM i load source sizes
In i 7.4, the maximum LUN size for Serial Attached SCSI drives (SAS) has been increased to 16 TB minus 1 block for 4160 or 4096 byte block sizes LUN The maximum LUN size in i 7.3 was 2 TB minus 1 block for 4096 byte block SAS disks and 4 TB minus 1 block for 4160 byte block size disk. An increase of 800% for 4096 LUNs and 400% for 4160 LUNs.
Increasing these LUN sizes also increases the maximum IBM i load source size for 4096 & 4160 SAS drives to 16 TB minus 1 block for i 7.4. This is a significant increase from the 2 TB minus 1 block\4 TB minus 1 block load source sizes that were available in i 7.3.
Support for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) coming soon
Power9 systems already have the ability to access Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) connected storage for Linux and AIX partitions.
While NVMe compatibility isn’t currently supported in IBM i, the i 7.4 announcement also contained a statement of direction (SOD) to add native IBM i NVMe support to the operating system. Keep watching IBM i announcements for delivery of this capability, possibly in a future technology refresh (TR).
Change your IBM i OS on POWER9, reap performance benefits
When you bought your IBM POWER9 server, you could only run IBM i 7.2 or 7.3. With i 7.4 available, you can now increase performance and disk capabilities after upgrading your operating system. But IBM isn’t just unleashing additional POWER9 capabilities with i 7.4. Check out our previous post on the new operating system and software capabilities that will become available after you upgrade to i 7.4. Between hardware and software upgrades, running IBM i 7.4 on POWER9 can provide lots of benefits for your organization.
