Which solution should the technical specialist recommend?

A customer has an existing IBM XIV Gen3 solution with 3 TB drives and nine modules. While performance is acceptable, the customer wants to increase the

performance of small-block reads. The current nine modules are running at 60% of capacity.

Which solution should the technical specialist recommend?
A . Add the SSD caching option on five modules.
B . Add the SSD caching option on all nine modules.
C . Add IBM Spectrum Control Software with an IBM FlashSystem 900.
D . Add three mode data modules to improve performance.

View Answer

Answer: A

Explanation:

SSD Caching improves small-block random read performance. SSD Caching in the XIV system can improve performance of any workload that is suffering from

high latency due to a high amount of small-block random read misses.

Consider a situation where you do not have an XIV system yet, but you want to know whether you might benefit from by extending the XIV with SSD Caching. On

most storage systems, you can inspect I/O statistics and determine whether a workload can benefit from SSD Caching. If the storage system has granular

reporting, you can take the following steps:

Sort your workload by read and write percentages.

The read portion of the workload can potentially benefit from the SSD Caching. A typical candidate workload for SSD Caching consists of 80% reads and 20%

writes.

Etc.

References: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4842.pdf

Solid-State Drive Caching in the IBM XIV Storage System (May 2012), page 20