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Status Under review
Workspace IBM Storage Virtualize / FlashSystem
Created by Guest
Created on Aug 4, 2025

RELATED IDEAS

FCM Drives on RDMA Enabled Expansion Enclosure

While the FCM 4 NVMe drives has been a grand success & a milestone in the Storage Industry, we are noticing challenges with vertical scalability, among the customers, where they are unable to expand the FCM & NVMe Pool (using Expansions), requiring them to add more Syste.

Due to this limitation, customers have currently stopped procuring expansion, and are using Control enclosures to scale. They have started indicating that this is not sustainable, and they are concerned about growing data.

While introducing SI & FS Grid has eased management, customers indicate there are too many moving parts, and additional investments on controllers each time cannot be justified to the management.

With this necessity, Idea is to introduce Expansion Enclosure with ROCE network protocol to enable RDMA, between Expansion & Control Enclosure.

Idea priority High
  • Admin
    Philip Clark
    Aug 22, 2025

    Thank you for submitting this enhancement request.

    Currently, if you want to propose a 2U24 controller and later expand with 2U24 expansion, please propose a 4U48 controller instead and leave 24 slots available for expansion. This is denser and higher performance and only a single enclosure to manage.

    We are considering adding NVMe expansions in the future. However, NVMe expansions are not the same as SAS expansions. An NVMe expansion has similar cost to an entire NVMe controller, whereas the controller gives you performance and scalability benefits - not just capacity.

    As the technology matures, I expect adding controllers to a FlashSystem grid will end up being the preferred option.


    Thanks,
    FlashSystem Team

    philipclark@ibm.com

    Reply
  • Guest
    Aug 4, 2025

    Thanks Sachin, While we have our own reasons not to add NVMe drives in enclosure as increasing drive doesn’t add up any performance rather increasing NVMe cost in enclosure. but if we look at the competition Netapp, HDS, Dell, even HPE has NVMe enclosure and sometime its tough to convince client as they said when 3 -4 OEM complies we can’t change for Only one OEM.I agree and voted for the same. (edit

    Reply

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