Reader Feedback on GST Says Buy Cheaper i5 Disk Controllers and Lots of Disks

Published: February 26, 2007

Well, that's what GST has to sell--disk. But, given the concept of single level store, and if a significant number of the up-coming disk accesses are, instead, in the spacious IBM disk controller card, the access to the data can be significantly faster (solid state "right now" vs. disk seek and disk read).

If one has, as its main application, multiple users accessing the same programs and data over and over again, the performance improvement delivered by a very large cache can be phenomenal. For this kind of an enterprise, a large cache is more important than more disk arms.

--Stanley

Not to be too cynical, Stanley, but you could say the same exact thing about IBM.

What is better for IBM of these two options? One: To have a system that has a relatively fast but thinly memoried disk controller, lots of cheap main memory that can be used to cache data closer to the CPUs (where it is needed), and lots of very inexpensive disk arms to keep the main memory, L3 and L2 caches well fed. Or two: To sell an expensive controller with lots of read and write cache (which costs next to nothing but you can act like it costs a lot more), convince customers to buy the bare minimum of very expensive disk arms (that are priced well above street price on other servers), and have very pricey main memory on the server that customers buy begrudgingly.

The former option might yield the same performance as the latter, but the latter option has a lot fewer parts and will almost certainly yield IBM more revenue and profits.

I agree that a lot depends on workload. But I think that when it comes to servers, there are many ways to skin cats, and I further believe that System i5 shops need lots of options. Not fewer and fewer.

--TPM

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