Storage Disk Types

As you may be aware there are two mainstream types of Storage Disk: Hard Drives (HDD) and Solid State Drives (SSD), with SSDs being the faster of the two. However IBM has developed their own proprietary Disk called FlashCore Modules (FCM).

FCM4

At the higher end of the scale of SSD storage are IBM FlashCore Modules (FCM) with the current release of the FCM4. The FCM4 modules have a number of high-end capabilities not usable in standard SAS SSD’s.

The FCM design utilizes the NVMe protocol, a PCIe Gen3/ Gen4 U.2 interface, and high-speed NAND memory to provide high throughput and IOPS with consistent and predictable latency. Hardware-based data compression and self-encryption are supported.

Data Warehousing

A data warehouse is a system that enables an organisation to run powerful analytics on a large scale, up to petabytes of data in ways that a standard database cannot.

As such, FCMs are ideal when it comes to setting up a data warehouses as they can provide constant cover and protection for all data within.

Improved hardware durability

With HDD’s there is always a risk of hardware durability issues due to the moving parts. The same can be said with SSDs as wear begins to occur on the data cells (though typically they last much longer that their HDD counterparts). To counter this, the FCM4 continually monitors every cell within the drive and implements various technical methods and techniques to ensure that the lifespan of each disk is increased exponentially. Details on this can be found on page 10 of the IBM Redbook below:
Redbooks.ibm

On-disk real-time threat detection

FCM4 modules are unique.  They provide on-disk real-time threat detection which do not affect the I/O speeds of the disk, and remove the overhead from the controller on the storage for nearly no performance impact. This can also be combined with the IBM Storage Insights Professional solution which will provide AI-Powered threat detection, which constantly improves over time.

On-disk data reduction processing

Just as the FCM4 modules provide threat detection with next to no impact performance, the same can be said for the data reduction capabilities. This is typically a 3:1 ratio, and in some scenarios even 4:1.

The FCM4 modules can also be combined with the FlashSystem Safeguarded Copy to protect from ransomware attacks, catastrophic destruction of data and user errors; brief description of which is below:

Your data is kept safe, secure and recoverable

After a cyber-attack, you don’t want to discover that your sensitive point-in-time copies are corrupted or missing. IBM Safeguarded Copy provides immutable points of data recovery that are hidden and protected from being modified or deleted due to user errors, malicious destruction, or ransomware attacks. These immutable copies are a secure data source that can be used for forensic analysis or surgical or catastrophic recovery.  

With Safeguarded Copy, storage administrators can ensure that data is kept safe, secure and recoverable in a transparent and easy-to-manage way. The backup volume is a hidden, non-addressable volume that does not consume any regular volume addresses. 

• Copies can be maintained at either production or recovery sites. 
• Storage targets are protected against malicious actions, with additional security provided through unique user roles. 
• Safeguarded Copy capacity is allocated in the best-performing storage tier available, minimizing performance impacts from writing backup data. 
• Safeguarded Copy can be integrated with different disaster-recovery and high-availability configurations. 
• Different user roles and authority levels can be used to manage production source volumes, backup capacity and recovery volumes.