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Table of Contents
Abstract
The ThinkSystem P5520 Read Intensive NVMe SSDs are general-purpose yet high-performance drives with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. They are designed 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.
This product guide introduces the drives and describes their features and specifications, and provides compatibility information. This guide is intended for technical specialists, sales specialists, sales engineers, IT architects, and other IT professionals who want to learn more about the P5520 SSDs and consider their use in IT solutions.
Change History
Changes in the June 15, 2023 update:
- Updated the Sequential write rate for the 15.36TB drive - Technical specifications section
Introduction
The ThinkSystem P5520 Read Intensive NVMe SSDs are general-purpose yet high-performance drives with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. They are designed 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.
The P5520 SSDs are based on Intel-developed controller, firmware, and 144-layer TLC Intel 3D NAND technology. Rigorous qualification and compatibility testing by Lenovo ensures a highly reliable SSD.
SED support: All drives listed in this product guide include SED drive encryption. Our naming convention for new drives doesn’t include SED in the name.
Figure 1. ThinkSystem P5520 Read Intensive NVMe SSDs (without the ThinkSystem hot-swap tray)
Did You Know?
The P5520 SSDs are part of the growing family of PCIe 4.0 SSDs that match the performance of the ThinkSystem V2 family of servers. By having a Gen 4 host interface, sequential performance is doubled compared to Gen 3 SSDs. The NVMe host interface also maximizes flash storage performance and minimizes latency. The P5520 SSDs drives offer 40% and 60% improvements in latency over SAS and SATA SSDs respectively.
Lenovo Read Intensive SSDs like the P5520 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.
Part number information
The following table lists the ordering part numbers and feature codes for the P5520 SSDs.
The part numbers for the drives include the following items:
- One drive with a hot-swap tray attached
- Publication package
Features
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 significantly greater bandwidth and lower 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 P5520 SSDs have the following key characteristics:
- Based on the Solidigm D7-P5520 SSDs (formerly known as the Intel D7-P5520 SSDs)
- PCIe 4.0 connection for each NVMe drive
- Also supports PCIe 3.0 host connection for servers with first and second-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors or with PCIe 3.0 NVMe switch adapters
- Compliant with Trusted Computing Group Opal 2.01 Security Subsystem Class cryptographic standard (TCG Opal 2.01 SSC)
- Intel 144 layer TLC 3D NAND Flash Memory
- Ultra-low I/O latency, with a read latency as low as of 10 µs and write latency as low as 12 µs
- Suitable for read-intensive workloads
- Available in capacities up to 15.36 TB
- Variable sector size and end-to-end data-path protection
- Enhanced power-loss data protection
- Thermal throttling and monitoring
- SMART health reporting
- Supports the following specifications:
- PCI Express Base Specification Rev. 4.0
- NVM Express 1.4
- NVM Express Management Interface 1.1
The key metric for solid state drives is their endurance (life expectancy). SSDs have a huge, but finite, number of program/erase (P/E) cycles, which determines how long the drives can perform write operations and thus their life expectancy. Write Intensive SSDs have better endurance than Mixed Use SSDs, which in turn have better endurance than Read Intensive SSDs.
SSD write endurance is typically measured by the number of program/erase cycles that the drive can incur over its lifetime, which is listed as TBW in the device specification. The TBW value that is assigned to a solid-state device is the total bytes of written data that a drive can be guaranteed to complete. Reaching this limit does not cause the drive to immediately fail; the TBW simply denotes the maximum number of writes that can be guaranteed.
A solid-state device does not fail upon reaching the specified TBW, but at some point after surpassing the TBW value (and based on manufacturing variance margins), the drive reaches the end-of-life point, at which time the drive goes into read-only mode. Because of such behavior, careful planning must be done to use SSDs in the application environments to ensure that the TBW of the drive is not exceeded before the required life expectancy.
For example, the 3.84 TB P5520 drive has an endurance of 7,000 TB of total bytes written (TBW). This means that for full operation over five years, write workload must be limited to no more than 3,836 GB of writes per day, which is equivalent to 1.0 full drive writes per day (DWPD). For the device to last three years, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 6,393 GB of writes per day, which is equivalent to 1.7 full drive writes per day.
The benefits of drive encryption
All ThinkSystem P5520 Read Intensive NVMe SSDs support drive encryption.
Self-encrypting drives (SEDs) provide benefits in three main ways:
- By encrypting data on-the-fly at the drive level with no performance impact
- By providing instant secure erasure (cryptographic erasure, thereby making the data no longer readable)
- By enabling auto-locking to secure active data if a drive is misplaced or stolen from a system while in use
The following sections describe the benefits in more details.
Automatic encryption
It is vital that a company keep its data secure. With the threat of data loss due to physical theft or improper inventory practices, it is important that the data be encrypted. However, challenges with performance, scalability, and complexity have led IT departments to push back against security policies that require the use of encryption. In addition, encryption has been viewed as risky by those unfamiliar with key management, a process for ensuring a company can always decrypt its own data. Self-encrypting drives comprehensively resolve these issues, making encryption both easy and affordable.
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.
Drive retirement and disposal
When hard drives are retired and moved outside the physically protected data center into the hands of others, the data on those drives is put at significant risk. IT departments retire drives for a variety of reasons, including:
- Returning drives for warranty, repair, or expired lease agreements
- Removal and disposal of drives
- Repurposing drives for other storage duties
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.
The drawbacks of today’s drive retirement practices include the following:
- Overwriting drive data is expensive, tying up valuable system resources for days. No notification of completion is generated by the drive, and overwriting won’t cover reallocated sectors, leaving that data exposed.
- Methods that include degaussing or physically shredding a drive are expensive. It is difficult to ensure the degauss strength is optimized for the drive type, potentially leaving readable data on the drive. Physically shredding the drive is environmentally hazardous, and neither practice allows the drive to be returned for warranty or expired lease.
- Some companies have concluded the only way to securely retire drives is to keep them in their control, storing them indefinitely in warehouses. But this is not truly secure because a large volume of drives coupled with human involvement inevitably leads to some drives being lost or stolen.
- Professional disposal services is an expensive option and includes the cost of reconciling the services as well as internal reports and auditing. Transporting of the drives also has the potential of putting the data at risk.
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.
Instant secure erase
The self-encrypting drive provides instant data encryption key destruction via cryptographic erasure. When it is time to retire or repurpose the drive, the owner sends a command to the drive to perform a cryptographic erasure. Cryptographic erasure simply replaces the encryption key inside the encrypted drive, making it impossible to ever decrypt the data encrypted with the deleted key.
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.
Furthermore, self-encrypting drives simplify decommissioning and preserve hardware value for returns and repurposing by:
- Eliminating the need to overwrite or destroy the drive
- Securing warranty returns and expired lease returns
- Enabling drives to be repurposed securely
Auto-locking
Insider theft or misplacement is a growing concern for businesses of all sizes; in addition, managers of branch offices and small businesses without strong physical security face greater vulnerability to external theft. Self-encrypting drives include a feature called auto-lock mode to help secure active data against theft.
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.
Technical specifications
The following table present technical specifications for the P5520 SSDs. Note that the performance data and power consumption is based on a PCIe 4.0 host interface.
* Latency measured using 4 KB transfer size with queue depth = 1 on a random workload.
Server support
The following tables list the ThinkSystem servers that are compatible.
- Only available as a field upgrade; Not currently available in CTO factory orders (23-1)
Storage controller support
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/switch adapter) or simply a cable that connects to an onboard NVMe connector.
PCIe 3.0 support: The P5520 SSDs offer a PCIe 4.0 host interface, however they are backward compatible with a PCIe 3.0 host interface. Note however that servers with a PCIe 3.0 host interface will not see the same performance levels (especially sequential read and write rates). Some ThinkSystem NVMe switch adapters also provide a PCIe 3.0 host interface to attached drives.
Consult the relevant server product guide for details about required components for NVMe drive support.
Operating system support
The P5520 SSDs support the following operating systems:
Tip: These tables are automatically generated based on data from Lenovo ServerProven.
VMware vSAN certification: The drives listed in this product guide are VMware vSAN certified, however in the VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG), they are listed under the drive vendor company name instead of Lenovo. To check a drive for vSAN certification, search the VCG using the Supplier part number as listed in Table 1 in the Part number information section.
1 For limitation, please refer Support Tip TT1154
2 For limitation, please refer Support Tip TT1154, Support Tip 104278
1 The OS is not supported with EPYC 7003 processors.
2 ISG will not sell/preload this OS, but compatibility and cert only.
IBM SKLM Key Management 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 FoD upgrades for SKLM support.
Warranty
The P5520 SSDs carry a 1-year, customer-replaceable unit (CRU) limited warranty. When installed in a supported Lenovo server, these drives assume the system’s base warranty and any warranty upgrade.
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.
Physical specifications
The P5520 SSDs have the following physical dimensions and weight:
- Height: 15 mm (0.6 in.)
- Width: 70 mm (2.8 in.)
- Depth: 100 mm (4.0 in.)
- Weight: 146 g (5.15 oz)
Operating environment
The P5520 SSDs are supported in the following environment:
- Temperature (operational): 0 to 70 °C (32 to 158 °F) at 0 to 3,048 m (0 to 10,000 ft)
- Relative humidity: 5 to 90% (non-condensing)
- Maximum altitude (operational): 3,048 m (10,000 ft)
- Shock: 1,000 G (Max) at 0.5 ms
- Vibration: 2.17 GRMS (5-700 Hz)
Agency approvals
The P5520 SSDs conform to the following regulations:
- FCC Title 47, Part 15B, Class B
- CA/CSA-CEI/IEC CISPR 22:02
- EN 55024: 1998
- EN 55022: 2006
- EN-60950-1 2nd Edition
- UL/CSA EN-60950-1 2nd Edition
- Low Voltage Directive 2006/95/EC
- C-Tick: AS/NZS3584
- BSMI: CNS 13438
- KCC Article 11.1
- RoHS DIRECTIVE 2011/65/EU
- WEEE Directive 2002/96/EC
Related publications and links
For more information, see the following documents:
- Storage Options for ThinkSystem Servers
https://lenovopress.com/lp0761-storage-options-for-thinksystem-servers - ServerProven
https://serverproven.lenovo.com/ - Solidigm D7 Series product page
https://www.solidigm.com/us/en/products/data-center/d7.html
Trademarks
Lenovo and the Lenovo logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo in the United States, other countries, or both. A current list of Lenovo trademarks is available on the Web at https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/legal/copytrade/.
The following terms are trademarks of Lenovo in the United States, other countries, or both:
Lenovo®
ServerProven®
System x®
ThinkSystem®
The following terms are trademarks of other companies:
AMD is a trademark of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Intel® and Xeon® are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.
Linux® is the trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.
Microsoft®, Windows Server®, and Windows® are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
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Full Change History
Changes in the June 15, 2023 update:
- Updated the Sequential write rate for the 15.36TB drive - Technical specifications section
Changes in the April 12, 2023 update:
- Added a note about VMware vSAN certification - Operating system support section
Changes in the March 20, 2023 update:
- New trayless drive option:
- ThinkSystem 2.5" 15mm U.2 P5520 7.68TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 Trayless SSD, 4XB7A83978
Changes in the November 22, 2022 update:
- New drive option - Part number information section
- ThinkSystem 3.5" U.2 P5520 1.92TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 SS SSD, 4XB7A79664
Changes in the November 9, 2022 update:
- Added supplier part numbers - Part number information section
Changes in the October 13, 2022 update:
- Added PCIe and NVMe specifications - Features section
Changes in the August 23, 2022 update:
- Added the following new 2.5-inch hot-swap drives:
- ThinkSystem 2.5" U.2 P5520 7.68TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD, 4XB7A13943
- ThinkSystem 2.5" U.2 P5520 15.36TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD, 4XB7A13631
- Added the following new 3.5-inch hot-swap drives:
- ThinkSystem 3.5" U.2 P5520 7.68TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD, 4XB7A76778
- ThinkSystem 3.5" U.2 P5520 15.36TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD, 4XB7A76779
- Added the following new Trayless drives:
- ThinkSystem 2.5" 15mm U.2 P5520 1.92TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 Trayless SSD, 4XB7A76780
- ThinkSystem 2.5" 15mm U.2 P5520 3.84TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 Trayless SSD, 4XB7A17124
Changes in the June 10, 2022 update:
- Added the OS compatibility matrix for the drives - Operating system support section
First published: May 24, 2022
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