The above is an updated chart from last months SCI newsletter StorInt™ SPC Performance Report depicting the top 10 SPC-1 submissions IOPS™ per GB-NAND. We have been searching for a while now how to depict storage system effectiveness when using SSD or other flash storage. We have used IOPS/SSD in the past but IOPS/GB-NAND looks better.
Calculating IOPS/GB-NAND
SPC-1 does not report this metric but it can be calculated by dividing IOPS by NAND storage capacity. One can find out NAND storage capacity by looking over SPC-1 full disclosure reports (FDR), totaling up the NAND storage in the configuration in all the SSDs and flash devices. This is total NAND capacity, not Total ASU (used storage) Capacity. GB-NAND reflects just what’s indicated for SSD/flash device capacity in the configuration section. This is not necessarily the device’s physical NAND capacity when over provisioned, but at least it’s available in the FDR.
DataCore Parallel Server IOPS/GB-NAND explained
The DataCore Parallel Server generated over 5M IOPS (IO’s/second) under an SPC-1 (OLTP-like) workload. And with their 54-480GB SSDs, totaling ~25.9TB of NAND capacity, it gives them just under 200 IOPS/GB-NAND. The chart in the original report was incorrect. There we used 36-480GB SSDs or ~17.3TB of NAND to compute IOPS/GB-NAND, which gave them just under 300 IOPS/GB-NAND in the report, which was incorrect. (The full report has been since corrected and is available for re-download for subscribers to our newsletter).
The 480GB (Samsung SM863 MZ-7KM480E)SSDs were all SATA attached. Samsung lists these SSDs as V-NAND, MLC drives, rated at 97K random Reads and 26K random writes. At over 5M IOPS, it should be running close to 100% of the SSDs rated performance. However, DataCore’s Parallel Server included 2 controllers with a total of 3TB of DRAM cache, which was then SAS connected to 4 DELL MD1220 storage arrays, each with 512GB of DRAM cache, so their total configuration had about 5TB of DRAM in it, most of which would have been used as a IO cache.
The SPC-1 submission only used 11.8TB (Total ASU capacity) of storage. All the DRAM cache help to explain how they attained 5M IOPS. Having a multi-tiered cache like DataCore-MD1220 configuration, doesn’t insure that all the cache is effectively used but even without cache tiering logic, there might not be much of an overlap between the MD1220 and Parallel Server caches. It would be more interesting to see how busy the SSDs were during this SPC-1 run.
How random the SPC-1 workload is, is subject to much speculation in the industry. Suffice it to say it’s not 100% random, but what is. Non-random OLTP workloads would tend to favor larger caches.
SPC is coming out with a new version of their benchmark with supplementary information which may shed more light on device busyness.
All SPC-1 benchmark submissions are available at storageperformance.org.
Want more?
The August 2016 and our other SPC Performance reports have much more information on SPC-1 and SPC-2 performance. Moreover, there’s a lot more performance information, covering email and other (OLTP and throughput intensive) block storage workloads, in our SAN Storage Buying Guide, available for purchase on our website. More information on file and block protocol/interface performance is included in SCI’s SAN-NAS Buying Guide, also available from our website .
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The complete SPC performance report went out in SCI’s August 2016 Storage Intelligence e-newsletter. A copy of the report will be posted on our SCI dispatches (posts) page over the next quarter or so (if all goes well). However, you can get the latest storage performance analysis now and subscribe to future free SCI Storage Intelligence e-newsletters, by just using the signup form in the sidebar or you can subscribe here.