This parameter specifies the number of I/O servers for a database. No more than this number of I/Os for prefetching and utilities can be in progress for a database at any time.
I/O servers, also called prefetchers, are used on behalf of the database agents to perform prefetch I/O and asynchronous I/O by utilities such as backup and restore. An I/O server waits while an I/O operation that it initiated is in progress. Non-prefetch I/Os are scheduled directly from the database agents and as a result are not constrained by num_ioservers.
If this parameter is set to AUTOMATIC, the number of prefetchers started will be based on the parallelism settings of the table spaces in the current database partition.
number of prefetchers = max( max over all table spaces( parallelism setting ), 3 )
Where parallelism settings are controlled by the DB2_PARALLEL_IO system environment variable.Recommendation: In order to fully exploit all the I/O devices in the system, a good value to use is generally one or two more than the number of physical devices on which the database resides. It is better to configure additional I/O servers, since there is some additional processing time associated with each I/O server and any unused I/O servers will remain idle.