ThinkSystem 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs

The ThinkSystem 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe SSDs are general-purpose yet high-performance family of NVMe solid-state drives. They are engineered for greater performance and endurance in a cost-effective design, and to support a broader set of workloads. Now with SED encryption as standard, these drives help ensure data security, even when the drive is removed from the server.

Figure 1. ThinkSystem 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe SSDs

Lenovo Read Intensive (Entry) SSDs are suitable for read-intensive and general-purpose data center workloads, however their NVMe PCIe interface means the drives also offer high performance. Overall, these SSDs provide outstanding IOPS/watt and cost/IOPS for enterprise solutions.

Self-encrypting drives (SEDs) provide benefits by encrypting data on-the-fly at the drive level with no performance impact, by providing instant secure erasure thereby making the data no longer readable, and by enabling auto-locking to secure active data if a drive is misplaced or stolen from a system while in use. These features are essential for many businesses, especially those storing customer data.

The following table lists the part numbers and feature codes for the 6500 ION SSDs.

The part numbers include the following items:

Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is PCIe high performance SSD technology that provides high I/O throughput and low latency. NVMe interfaces remove SAS/SATA bottlenecks and unleash all of the capabilities of contemporary NAND flash memory. Each NVMe PCI SSD has direct PCIe x4 connection, which provides at least 2x more bandwidth and 2x less latency than SATA/SAS-based SSD solutions. NVMe drives are also optimized for heavy multi-threaded workloads by using internal parallelism and many other improvements, such as enlarged I/O queues.

The ThinkSystem 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe SSDs have the following features:

• NVMe SSD with PCIe 4.0 performance and a U.3 interface
• Based on the Micron 6500 ION family of SSDs
• Compliant with Trusted Computing Group Opal 2.01 Security Subsystem Class cryptographic standard (TCG Opal 2.01 SSC)
• Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND
• Direct PCIe 4.0 x4 connection for each NVMe drive, resulting in up to 8 GBps overall throughput.
• Advanced ECC Engine and End-to-End Data Protection
• Protect data integrity from unexpected power loss with advanced power-loss protection architecture
• Adaptive Thermal Monitoring to monitor the internal temperature of the drive with power adjustment to ensure operation within thermal limits
• Supports Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T).
• Enterprise-level security features:
  • Secure Execution Environment - dedicated security processing hardware with physical isolation
  • Asymmetric Roots of Trust - Enables authenticated revocation of root keys
  • Strong Asymmetric Key Support - Uses standard, NIST-approved algorithms with 208-bit/3072-bit RSA keys
  • RSA Delegation Key Support - Enables customers to maintain ownership of RSA keys
  • Secure Boot - Helps ensure firmware integrity on running platform
  • Key-Based Firmware Update - Validates firmware using public key-based authentication prior to firmware update
  • Key-Based Privileged Access - Protects against unauthorized privileged SSD function execution with public key-based authorization

Read Intensive SSDs and Write Intensive SSDs have similar read IOPS performance, but the key difference between them is their endurance -- how long they can reliably perform write operations. Read Intensive SSDs have a better cost/IOPS ratio but lower endurance compared to Write Intensive SSDs. SSD write endurance is typically measured by the number of program/erase (P/E) write cycles that the drive incurs over its lifetime, listed as the total bytes of written data (TBW) in the device specification.

The TBW value assigned to a solid-state device is the total bytes of written data (based on the number of P/E cycles) that a drive can be guaranteed to complete (% of remaining P/E cycles = % of remaining TBW). Reaching this limit does not cause the drive to immediately fail. It simply denotes the maximum number of writes that can be guaranteed. A solid-state device will not fail upon reaching the specified TBW. At some point based on manufacturing variance margin, after surpassing the TBW value, the drive will reach the end-of-life point, at which the drive will go into a read-only mode.

Because of such behavior by Read Intensive solid-state drives, careful planning must be done to use them only in read-intensive or mixed use (70% read/30% write) environments to ensure that the TBW of the drive will not be exceeded before the required life expectancy.

For example, the 30.72 TB drive has an endurance of 16,800 TB of total bytes written (TBW). This means that for full operation over five years, write workload must be limited to no more than 9,205 GB of writes per day, which is equivalent to 0.3 full drive writes per day (DWPD). For the device to last three years, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 15,342 GB of writes per day, which is equivalent to 0.5 full drive writes per day.

All ThinkSystem 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe SSDs support drive encryption.

The following sections describe the benefits in more details.

When the self-encrypting drive is in normal use, its owner need not maintain authentication keys (otherwise known as credentials or passwords) in order to access the data on the drive. The self-encrypting drive will encrypt data being written to the drive and decrypt data being read from it, all without requiring an authentication key from the owner.

Nearly all drives eventually leave the data center and their owner's control. Corporate data resides on such drives, and when most leave the data center, the data they contain is still readable. Even data that has been striped across many drives in a RAID array is vulnerable to data theft because just a typical single stripe in today’s high-capacity arrays is large enough to expose for example, hundreds of names and bank account numbers.

In an effort to avoid data breaches and the ensuing customer notifications required by data privacy laws, companies use different methods to erase the data on retired drives before they leave the premises and potentially fall into the wrong hands. Current retirement practices that are designed to make data unreadable rely on significant human involvement in the process, and are thus subject to both technical and human failure.

Self-encrypting drives eliminate the need to overwrite, destroy, or store retired drives. When the drive is to be retired, it can be cryptographically erased, a process that is nearly instantaneous regardless of the capacity of the drive.

Self-encrypting drives reduce IT operating expenses by reducing asset control challenges and disposal costs. Data security with self-encrypting drives helps ensure compliance with privacy regulations without hindering IT efficiency. So called "Safe Harbor" clauses in government regulations allow companies to not have to notify customers of occurrences of data theft if that data was encrypted and therefore unreadable.

Using a self-encrypting drive when auto-lock mode is enabled simply requires securing the drive with an authentication key. When secured in this manner, the drive’s data encryption key is locked whenever the drive is powered down. In other words, the moment the self-encrypting drive is switched off or unplugged, it automatically locks down the drive’s data.

When the self-encrypting drive is then powered back on, it requires authentication before being able to unlock its encryption key and read any data on the drive, thus protecting against misplacement and theft.

While using self-encrypting drives just for the instant secure erase is an extremely efficient and effective means to help securely retire a drive, using self-encrypting drives in auto-lock mode provides even more advantages. From the moment the drive or system is removed from the data center (with or without authorization), the drive is locked. No advance thought or action is required from the data center administrator to protect the data. This helps prevent a breach should the drive be mishandled and helps secure the data against the threat of insider or outside theft.

The following table presents technical specifications for the ThinkSystem 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe SSDs.

The following tables list the ThinkSystem servers that are compatible.

NVMe PCIe SSDs require a NVMe drive backplane and some form of PCIe connection to processors. PCIe connections can take the form of either an adapter (PCIe Interposer or PCIe extender) or simply a cable that connects to an onboard NVMe connector.

Consult the relevant server product guide for details about required components for NVMe drive support.

To effectively manage a large deployment of SEDs in Lenovo servers, IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager (SKLM) offers a centralized key management solution. Certain Lenovo servers support Features on Demand (FoD) license upgrades that enable SKLM support.

The following table lists the part numbers and feature codes to enable SKLM support in the management processor of the server.

The IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager software is available from Lenovo using the ordering information listed in the following table.

The following tables list the ThinkSystem servers that support the SKLM FoD license upgrades.

The 6500 ION SSDs carry a one-year, customer-replaceable unit (CRU) limited warranty. When the SSDs are installed in a supported server, these drives assume the system’s base warranty and any warranty upgrades.

Solid State Memory cells have an intrinsic, finite number of program/erase cycles that each cell can incur. As a result, each solid state device has a maximum amount of program/erase cycles to which it can be subjected. The warranty for Lenovo solid state drives (SSDs) is limited to drives that have not reached the maximum guaranteed number of program/erase cycles, as documented in the Official Published Specifications for the SSD product. A drive that reaches this limit may fail to operate according to its Specifications.

The 6500 ION SSDs have the following physical specifications:

• Height: 15mm (0.6 in.)
• Width: 70 mm (2.8 in.)
• Depth: 100 mm (4.0 in.)
• Weight: 200 g (7.1 oz)

The 6500 ION SSDs are supported in the following environment:

• Temperature:
  • Operating: 0 to 70 °C (32 to 158 °F)
  • Non-operating: -40 to 85 °C (-40 to 185 °F)
• Relative humidity, Non-operating: 5 to 90% (non-condensing)
• Maximum altitude: 3,050 m (10,000 ft)
• Shock, non-operating: 1,500 G (Max) at 0.5 ms
• Vibration, non-operating: 9.1 G_RMS (5-800 Hz)

The 6500 ION SSDs conform to the following regulations:

• CE (Europe): EN55032, EN55024 Class B, RoHS
• FCC: CFR Title 47, Part 15, Class B
• UL/cUL: approval to UL-60950-1, 2nd Edition, IEC 60950-1:2005 (2nd Edition); EN 60950-1 (2006) + A11:2009+ A1:2010 + A12:2011 + A2:2013
• BSMI (Taiwan): approval to CNS 13438, Class B, CNS 15663
• RCM (Australia, New Zealand): AS/NZS CISPR32 Class B
• KC RRL (Korea): approval to KN32 Class B, KN 35 Class B
• W.E.E.E.: Compliance with EU WEEE directive 2012/19/EC.
• TUV (Germany): approval to IEC60950/EN60950
• VCCI (Japan): 2015-04 Class B
• IC (Canada): ICES-003 Class B
• Morocco: EN55032, EN55024 Class B
• UkrSEPRO (Ukraine): EN55032 Class B, IEC60950/EN60950, RoHS (Resolution 2017 No. 139)
• UKCA (UK): SI 2016/1091 Class B and SI 2012/3032 RoHS

For more information, see the following documents:

• Lenovo ThinkSystem storage options product web page
  https://lenovopress.com/lp0761-storage-options-for-thinksystem-servers

• Micron 6500 ION product page
  https://www.micron.com/products/ssd/product-lines/6500-ion