The purpose of this high performance I/O study is to demonstrate that the IBM pSeries 690 has a very powerful I/O subsystem for handling sequential I/O workloads. The study shows that an appropriately configured pSeries 690 system is capable of sustaining 18.5 gigabytes per second (GB/s) sequential I/O. When performing disk I/O using a modified GPFS, the server can sustain 15.8 GB/s aggregate sequential read or 14.5 GB/s aggregate write performance.

In this paper we discuss the capabilities of the newest IBM pSeries 690 processor and its I/O subsystem. We provide GPFS configuration details and discuss GPFS options for attaining the best performance. We also include details about the selection of the disk subsystem and disk adapters. Finally, we provide guidance on selecting the proper RAID configuration, as well as other performance and tuning tips.