IBM’s
DS8000 Storage server is built on the
POWER5 architecture platform, which supports logically partitioned address regions,
or LPARs. The Tiburon project in Research explores how to use these LPARs
to place data-intensive processing on the storage, close to the data,
to achieve higher performance and better price/performance than
with a conventional deployment on outboard application servers.
Storage LPARs offer significant benefits as a platform for
off-the-shelf application software and middleware, such as DB2.
We are also working on novel data-intensive services that only
make sense when integrated into the storage server.
Logical partitioning uses the POWER5
hypervisor for allocating CPU, memory and I/O resources between
multiple images or virtual machines. Each partition starts as a
sandbox that is fully isolated from other partitions; it runs its
own operating system image and application instances. The partitions
can use network resources to communicate, as separate machines
would. In addition, we can create carefully chosen windows in the
walls of isolation between partitions, so they can communicate
directly in memory. For example, the software on one partition can
act as a SCSI target that responds to virtual I/O requests from
another partition.
Without LPARs, one might deploy a typical application using hardware as shown here:
Using LPARs for applications, this might be consolidated into:
Potential benefits of using LPARs include:
- Less hardware for the same capabilities and performance
- Performance benefits via in-memory virtual I/O such as virtual SCSI (VSCSI) and virtual Ethernet (VLAN)
- Dynamic resource reallocation between applications and storage service
- Coordinated configuration of storage, middleware and applications
IBM Almaden Research - Advanced Storage Systems
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