Lenovo 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs Think System User Guide

Lenovo 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs Think System

INTRODUCTION

Product Guide
The ThinkSystem 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe SSDs are a 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.

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 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe SSDs

Did you know?
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.

Part number information
The following table lists the part numbers and feature codes for the 6500 ION SSDs.
Table 1. Part number information

The part numbers include the following items:

• One solid-state drive
• Hot swap drives include a hot-swap tray
• Documentation flyer

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 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.

The benefits of drive encryption

All ThinkSystem 6500 ION 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
A company must keep its data secure. With the threat of data loss due to physical theft or improper inventory practices, the data must 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 presents technical specifications for the ThinkSystem 6500 ION Read Intensive NVMe SSDs.
Table 2. Technical specifications

Server support
The following tables list the ThinkSystem servers that are compatible.
Table 3. Server support (Part 1 of 3)

Table 4. Server support (Part 2 of 3)

Table 5. Server support (Part 3 of 3)

Part Number| Description| 4S V1| 1S Intel V1| 2S Intel V1| Dense V1
---|---|---|---|---|---
SR850 (7X18 / 7X19)| SR850P (7D2F / 2D2G)| SR860 (7X69 / 7X70)| ST50 (7Y48 / 7Y50)| ST250 (7Y45 / 7Y46)| SR150 (7Y54)| SR250 (7Y52 / 7Y51)| ST550 (7X09 / 7X10)| SR530 (7X07 / 7X08)| SR550 (7X03 / 7X04)| SR570 (7Y02 / 7Y03)| SR590 (7X98 / 7X99)| SR630 (7X01 / 7X02)| SR650 (7X05 / 7X06)| SR670 (7Y36 / 7Y37)| SD530 (7X21)| SD650 (7X58)| SN550 (7X16)| SN850 (7X15)
4XB7A91176| ThinkSystem 2.5″ U.3 6500 ION 30.72TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N| N

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) 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.

Operating system support

The following table lists the supported operating systems.

Tip: This table is 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.

Table 6. Operating system support for ThinkSystem 2.5 U.3 6500 ION 30.72TB Read Intensive NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4 HS SSD, 4XB7A91176

Operating systems| SR630 V3| SR635 V3| SR650 V3| SR655 V3| SR630 V2| SR650 V2| SR635| SR655
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Microsoft Windows Server 2019| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
Microsoft Windows Server 2022| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6| N| N| N| N| N| N| Y 1| Y 1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7| N| N| N| N| N| N| Y 1| Y 1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8| N| N| N| N| N| N| Y 1| Y 1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.9| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| Y 1| Y 1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0| N| N| N| N| N| N| Y 1| Y 1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1| N| N| N| N| N| N| Y 1| Y 1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| Y 1| Y 1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| Y| Y
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| Y| Y
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| Y| Y
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1| N| N| N| N| N| N| Y 1| Y 1
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| Y| Y
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| Y| Y
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP5| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| N| N
Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS| N| Y| N| Y| N| N| N| N
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y| Y

The OS is not supported with EPYC 7003 processors.

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.
Table 7. FoD upgrades for SKLM support

Security Key Lifecycle Manager – FoD (United States, Canada, Asia Pacific, and Japan)
00D9998| A5U1| SKLM for System x/ThinkSystem w/SEDs – FoD per Install w/1Yr S&S
00D9999| AS6C| SKLM for System x/ThinkSystem w/SEDs – FoD per Install w/3Yr S&S
Security Key Lifecycle Manager – FoD (Latin America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa)
00FP648| A5U1| SKLM for System x/ThinkSystem w/SEDs – FoD per Install w/1Yr S&S
00FP649| AS6C| SKLM for System x/ThinkSystem w/SEDs – FoD per Install w/3Yr S&S

The IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager software is available from Lenovo using the ordering information listed in the following table.
Table 8. IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager licenses

SW Subscription & Support 12 Months
7S0A007HWW| IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager For Raw Decimal Terabyte Storage Resource Value Unit License + SW Subscription & Support 12 Months
7S0A007KWW| IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager For Raw Decimal Petabyte Storage Resource Value Unit License + SW Subscription & Support 12 Months
7S0A007MWW| IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager For Usable Decimal Terabyte Storage Resource Value Unit License + SW Subscription & Support 12 Months
7S0A007PWW| IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager For Usable Decimal Petabyte Storage Resource Value Unit License + SW Subscription & Support 12 Months

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

Table 9. IBM SKLM Key Management license upgrades (Part 1 of 3)

Table 10. IBM SKLM Key Management license upgrades (Part 2 of 3)

Table 11. IBM SKLM Key Management license upgrades (Part 3 of 3)

Part Number| Description| 4S V1| 1S Intel V1| 2S Intel V1| Dense V1
---|---|---|---|---|---
SR850 (7X18 / 7X19)| SR850P (7D2F / 2D2G)| SR860 (7X69 / 7X70)| ST50 (7Y48 / 7Y50)| ST250 (7Y45 / 7Y46)| SR150 (7Y54)| SR250 (7Y52 / 7Y51)| ST550 (7X09 / 7X10)| SR530 (7X07 / 7X08)| SR550 (7X03 / 7X04)| SR570 (7Y02 / 7Y03)| SR590 (7X98 / 7X99)| SR630 (7X01 / 7X02)| SR650 (7X05 / 7X06)| SR670 (7Y36 / 7Y37)| SD530 (7X21)| SD650 (7X58)| SN550 (7X16)| SN850 (7X15)
A5U1| SKLM for System x w/SEDs – FoD per Install w/1Yr S&S| Y| Y| N| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| N| Y| Y| Y| Y| N| N| N| N| N
AS6C| SKLM for System x w/SEDs – FoD per Install w/3Yr S&S| Y| Y| N| N| N| N| N| Y| Y| N| Y| Y| Y| Y| N| N| N| N| N

Warranty

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.

Physical 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)

Operating environment

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 GRMS (5-800 Hz)

Agency approvals
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

Related publications and links
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

Related product families
Product families related to this document are the following:

• Drives

Notices

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Any references in this publication to non-Lenovo websites are provided for convenience only and do not in any manner serve as an endorsement of those Websites. The materials at those Websites are not part of the materials for this Lenovo product, and use of those Websites is at your own risk. Any performance data contained herein was determined in a controlled environment. Therefore, the result obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. Some measurements may have been made on development-level systems and there is no guarantee that these measurements will be the same on generally available systems. Furthermore, some measurements may have been estimated through extrapolation. Actual results may vary. Users of this document should verify the applicable data for their specific environment.

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