This week I worked in conjunction with Dave Owen, who has published an article on ibmsystemsmag.com called “Moving Data to Solid State Drives.” Dave works on the SLIC Database enablement team in the IBM i development organization so he knows what he’s talking about.
If you’re thinking of installing solid state drives (SSDs) in the near future, you should first take a look at the technical document, “Customer Use of SSDs.” There’s a lot of good information in there and Dave references it, so you might want to start with reading that.
In his article, Dave’s intention is to point out some things not spelled out in the SSD doc that have caused confusion and to add emphasis to some of the things the doc does say. To summarize, Dave recommends:
- Installing ALL the recommended PTFs
- Using CHGPF, CHGLF or equivalent unless it is only a specific member (and no future members) for an object that you want to move
- Making sure nothing is running that could interfere with moving your objects to the preferred media
- Not doing anything to interfere with the move to preferred media once the move has been scheduled
- Being patient because the CHGxxx commands and their SQL equivalents only schedule the move; It may take a while before the move for an individual object completes
One other note: Dave doesn’t talk about whether or not SSDs will improve your performance or by how much. We have some good folks in Lab Services who can help you out on that. Last year, I wrote an article, Planning for Solid State Drives, where I reviewed an offering from the Performance and Scalability Services team in Rochester, Minn., for assistance in assessing whether SSDs are good candidates for your environment. If you’re unsure about whether SSDs will give you a performance improvement, revisit that blog article for additional information.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.