This IBM® Redpaper® Product Guide describes the IBM FlashSystem® 9500 solution, which is a next-generation IBM FlashSystem control enclosure. It combines the performance of flash and a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe)-optimized architecture with the reliability and innovation of IBM FlashCore® technology and the rich feature set and high availability (HA) of IBM Spectrum® Virtualize. Often, applications exist that are foundational to the operations and success of an enterprise. These applications might function as prime revenue generators, guide or control important tasks, or provide crucial business intelligence, among many other jobs. Whatever their purpose, they are mission critical to the organization. They demand the highest levels of performance, functionality, security, and availability. They also must be protected against the modern scourge, cyberattacks. To support such mission-critical applications, enterprises of all types and sizes turn to the IBM FlashSystem 9500. IBM FlashSystem 9500 provides a rich set of software-defined storage (SDS) features that are delivered by IBM Spectrum Virtualize, including the following examples: Data reduction and deduplication Dynamic tiering Thin-provisioning Snapshots Cloning Replication and data copy services Cyber resilience Transparent Cloud Tiering IBM HyperSwap® including 3-site replication for HA Scale-out and scale-up configurations that further enhance capacity and throughput for better availability With the release of IBM Spectrum Virtualize V8.5, extra functions and features are available, including support for new third-generation IBM FlashCore Modules NVMe-type drives within the control enclosure, and 100 Gbps Ethernet adapters that provide NVMe Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) options. New software features include GUI enhancements and security enhancements, including multifactor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO), and Fibre Channel (FC) portsets.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication captures several of the preferred practices and describes the performance gains that can be achieved by implementing the IBM FlashSystem® products that are powered by IBM Spectrum® Virtualize Version 8.4.2. These practices are based on field experience. This book highlights configuration guidelines and preferred practices for the storage area network (SAN) topology, clustered system, back-end storage, storage pools and managed disks, volumes, Remote Copy services, and hosts. It explains how you can optimize disk performance with the IBM System Storage Easy Tier® function. It also provides preferred practices for monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting. This book is intended for experienced storage, SAN, IBM FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller, and IBM Storwize® administrators and technicians. Understanding this book requires advanced knowledge of these environments.

This IBM® Redpaper Product Guide describes the IBM SAN Volume Controller model SV3 solution, which is a next-generation IBM SAN Volume Controller. Built with IBM Spectrum® Virtualize software and part of the IBM Spectrum Storage family, IBM SAN Volume Controller is an enterprise-class storage system. It helps organizations achieve better data economics by supporting the large-scale workloads that are critical to success. Data centers often contain a mix of storage systems. This situation can arise as a result of company mergers or as a deliberate acquisition strategy. Regardless of how they arise, mixed configurations add complexity to the data center. Different systems have different data services, which make it difficult to move data from one to another without updating automation. Different user interfaces increase the need for training and can make errors more likely. Different approaches to hybrid cloud complicate modernization strategies. Also, many different systems mean more silos of capacity, which can lead to inefficiency. To simplify the data center and to improve flexibility and efficiency in deploying storage, enterprises of all types and sizes turn to IBM SAN Volume Controller, which is built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize software. This software simplifies infrastructure and eliminates differences in management, function, and even hybrid cloud support. IBM SAN Volume Controller introduces a common approach to storage management, function, replication, and hybrid cloud that is independent of storage type. It is the key to modernizing and revitalizing your storage, but is as easy to understand. IBM SAN Volume Controller provides a rich set of software-defined storage (SDS) features that are delivered by IBM Spectrum Virtualize, including the following examples: Data reduction and deduplication Dynamic tiering Thin-provisioning Snapshots Cloning Replication and data copy services Data-at-rest encryption Cyber resilience Transparent Cloud Tiering IBM HyperSwap® including three-site replication for high availability (HA)

This IBM® Redbooks® Product Guide publication describes the IBM FlashSystem® 9200 solution, which is a comprehensive, all-flash, and NVMe-enabled enterprise storage solution that delivers the full capabilities of IBM FlashCore® technology. In addition, it provides a rich set of software-defined storage (SDS) features, including data reduction and de-duplication, dynamic tiering, thin-provisioning, snapshots, cloning, replication, data copy services, and IBM HyperSwap® for high availability (HA). Scale-out and scale-up configurations further enhance capacity and throughput for better availability.

The purpose of this IBM® Redpaper® document is to provide best practice guidelines to design and implement IBM FlashSystem® storage for database workloads. The recommended settings and values are based on lab testing, proof of concept (PoC) and experience drawn from customer implementations. Suggestions that are presented in this document are applicable to most production database environments to increase performance of I/O and availability. However, more considerations might be required while designing, configuring, and implementing storage for extreme transactional, analytical, and database cluster environments. Customers are migrating database storage to IBM FlashSystem largely due to low latency performance of the IBM FlashSystem family of Storage. Using IBM FlashSystem, IBM customers are able to achieve low latency for queries and transactions from milliseconds to microseconds, realize a multi-fold increase in application level transactions per second, increase CPU efficiency and reduce database licensing costs. Recent additions of data reduction technologies to IBM FlashSystem further increase overall TCO benefits. All IBM FlashSystem models now offer compression, which can reduce database storage by 40 - 80% depending on database software. In addition to best practices that are described in this document, the IBM FlashSystem Worldwide Solutions Engineering Team can further assist customers with performing analysis of current database workloads for IBM FlashSystem benefits, perform PoCs at our labs, and help with implementation.

This information is intended to facilitate the deployment of IBM© FlashSystem© for the Epic Corporation electronic health record (EHR) solution by describing the requirements and specifications for configuring IBM FlashSystem 9500 and its parameters. This document also describes the required steps to configure the server that hosts the EHR application. To complete these tasks, you must be knowledgeable of IBM FlashSystem 9500 and Epic applications. This Blueprint provides the following information: A solutions architecture and the related solution configuration information for the following essential components of software and hardware: Detailed technical configuration steps for configuring IBM FlashSystem 9500 Server configuration details for Caché database and Epic applications

IBM® FlashSystem 9100 combines the performance of flash and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) with the reliability and innovation of IBM FlashCore® technology and the rich features of IBM SpectrumTM Virtualize — all in a powerful 2U storage system. Providing intensive data driven multi-cloud storage capacity, FlashSystem 9100 is deeply integrated with the software-defined capabilities of IBM Spectrum StorageTM, which allows you to easily add the multi-cloud solutions that best support your business. In this IBM Redbooks® publication, we discuss the product's features and planning steps, architecture, installation, configuration, and hints and tips.

With Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), you can make a subset of a host's memory directly available to a remote host. RDMA is available on standard Ethernet-based networks by using the RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) interface. The RoCE network protocol is an industry-standard initiative by the InfiniBand Trade Association. This IBM® Redpaper publication describes how to set up RoCE to use within an IBM Spectrum® Scale cluster and IBM Elastic Storage® Systems (ESSs). This book is targeted at technical professionals (consultants, technical support staff, IT Architects, and IT Specialists) who are responsible for delivering cost-effective storage solutions with IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM ESSs.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication details the configuration and best practices for using the IBM FlashSystem® family of storage products within a VMware environment. The first version of this book was published in 2021 and specifically addressed IBM Spectrum® Virtualize Version 8.4 with VMware vSphere 7.0. This second version of this book includes all the enhancements that are available with IBM Spectrum Virtualize 8.5. Topics illustrate planning, configuring, operations, and preferred practices that include integration of IBM FlashSystem storage systems with the VMware vCloud suite of applications: VMware vSphere Web Client (vWC) vSphere Storage APIs - Storage Awareness (VASA) vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) Embedded VASA Provider for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) This book is intended for presales consulting engineers, sales engineers, and IBM clients who want to deploy IBM FlashSystem storage systems in virtualized data centers that are based on VMware vSphere.

IBM® HyperSwap® is the high availability (HA) solution that provides continuous data availability in case of hardware failure, power failure, connectivity failure, or disasters. The HyperSwap capability is available for IBM FlashSystem® A9000 and IBM FlashSystem A9000R, starting with software version 12.2.1. Version 12.3 introduces a function that combines HyperSwap and Asynchronous replication, which creates a solution that entails HA and Disaster Recovery (DR). One side of the HyperSwap pair has an active async link to the third system, and the other side has a standby link. Known as Multi-site HA/DR, this configuration provides HyperSwap active-active HA while keeping data mirrored to a third copy to ensure two levels of business continuity. This IBM RedpaperTM publication gives a broad understanding of the architecture, design, and implementation of HyperSwap and Multi-site HA/DR solution. It also discusses and illustrates various use cases pertaining to their use and functionality. This paper is intended for those users who want to deploy solutions that take advantage of HyperSwap and Multi-site HA/DR for FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R.