Pure Storage FlashBlade well positioned for next generation storage

IMG_6344Sometimes, long after I listen to a vendor’s discussion, I come away wondering why they do what they do. Oftentimes, it passes but after a recent session with Pure Storage at SFD10, it lingered.

Why engineer storage hardware?

In the last week or so, executives at Hitachi mentioned that they plan to reduce  hardware R&D activities for their high end storage. There was much confusion what it all meant but from what I hear, they are ahead now, and maybe it makes more sense to do less hardware and more software for their next generation high end storage. We have talked about hardware vs. software innovation a lot (see recent post: TPU and hardware vs. software innovation [round 3]).
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Google cloud offers SSD storage

Read an article the other day on Google Cloud tests out fast, high I/O SSD drives. I suppose it was only a matter of time before cloud services included SSDs in their I/O mix.

Yet, it doesn’t seem to me to be as simple as adding SSDs to the storage catalog. Enterprise storage vendors have had SSDs arguably since January of 2008 (see my EMC introduced SSDs to DMX dispatch). And although there are certainly a class of applications that can take advantage of SSD low latency/high IOPs, the vast majority of applications don’t seem to require these services.

Storage systems use of SSDs today

That’s why most enterprise storage system vendors support some form of automated storage tiering or flash caching of normal I/O for their high-end storage systems. Together with offering just plain old SSDs as data storage. In this more sophisticated solution customers have the option to assign application data to SSDs only, hybrid SSD-disks, or disk only storage. In this way the customer get’s to decide whether they want some sort of mix or just pure SSD or disk IO to satisfy their application IO requirements.

Storage startups have emerged that take on both the hybrid SSD-disk and all-flash model and add quality of service to the picture. An example of all-flash that supplies QoS version of all-flash storage is SolidFire (learn more about SolidFire in our GreyBeardsOnStorage podcast with Dave Wright).  An example that does the same sort of thing for hybrid storage is Fusion IOcontrol (formerly NexGen) storage.

Storage system QoS

In the case of SolidFire one can limit volume or volume groups with an IOPs max, throughput max, and a Burst max. The burst is sort of a credit that accrues on a time basis if the application doesn’t ask for the maximum IOPs/Througput which they then can consume above their maximums up to the burst max for a limited timeframe.

QoS capabilities are slowly making their way into enterprise storage systems as well but it will take some time for the instrumentation and capabilities to be put in place. But one can see limited QoS in IBM DS8000 priority IO, NetApp Storage QoS, EMC Unisphere QoS manager for VNX & SMC QoS for VMAX, and HDS SVOS QoS via partitioning. Most of these capabilities control access or partition cache, backend and frontend resources for host volumes. As such, they are not nearly as sophisticated or as easy to use as what SolidFire and other start ups are offering, but they are getting there.

Cloud SSD pricing

Back to the cloud offering. According to the GigaOm article, Google SSD volumes can sustain up to 15K IOPs and they are charging a premium price for this storage ($0.325/GB-month). Apparently Amazon AWS offers high IO EC2 storage as well with a maximum of 4K IOPs but charges a premium both for the storage ($0.125/GB month) and on an IOPs basis ($0.10/IOPS-month). GigaOM had a pricing comparison for 500GB and 2000 IOPs indicating that Google SSD storage would cost $163/month and the AWS provisioned SSD storage would cost $263 ($62.50 for storage and $200 for the 2000 IOPs).

The fact that you can drive the Google SSD to it’s limits without incurring any extra cost seems a serious advantage to me and would be very appealing to me to most enterprise customers.

But where’s latency

It seems to me after some IOPs level is attained, most mission critical applications are more interested in low latency IO (for more on why low latency matters seem my IO throughput vs. low latency post…). Many storage systems are capable of maximum of 100,000s of IOPS but most shops don’t run them that hard, ever. But with proper use of SSDs, most enterprise storage is now clocking IO at sub-msec. low latency IO.

However, I have yet to see any Cloud storage pricing or QoS for that matter that was based on latency guarantees.  I think this is a serious omission.

In any event, SSDs in the cloud is a good think now they just need to offer flash caching, automatic storage tiering and sophisticated QoS.  I realize this is partially re-inventing enterprise storage in the cloud but isn’t that what everyone actually wants, at cloud storage pricing of course.

Comments?

Latest SPC-2 performance results – chart of the month

Spider chart top 10 SPC-1 MB/second broken out by workload LFP, LDQ and VODIn the figure above you can see one of the charts from our latest performance dispatch on SPC-1 and SPC-2  benchmark results. The above chart shows SPC-2 throughput results sorted by aggregate MB/sec order, with all three workloads broken out for more information.

Just last quarter I was saying it didn’t appear as if any all-flash system could do well on SPC-2, throughput intensive workloads.  Well I was wrong (again) and with an aggregate MBPS™ of ~33.5GB/sec. Kaminario’s all-flash K2 took the SPC-2 MBPS results to a whole different level, almost doubling the nearest competitor in this category (Oracle ZFS ZS3-4).

Ok, Howard Marks (deepstorage.net), my GreyBeardsOnStorage podcast co-host and long-time friend, had warned me that SSDs had the throughput to be winners at SPC-2, but they would probably cost to much to be viable.  I didn’t believe him at the time — how wrong could I be.

As for cost, both Howard and I misjudged this one. The K2 came in at just under a $1M USD, whereas the #2, Oracle system was under $400K. But there were five other top 10 SPC-2 MPBS systems over $1M so the K2, all-flash system price was about average for the top 10.

Ok, if cost and high throughput aren’t the problem why haven’t we seen more all-flash systems SPC-2 benchmarks.  I tend to think that most flash systems are optimized for OLTP like update activity and not sequential throughput. The K2 is obviously one exception. But I think we need to go a little deeper into the numbers to understand just what it was doing so well.

The details

The LFP (large file processing) reported MBPS metric is the average of 1MB and 256KB data transfer sizes, streaming activity with 100% write, 100% read and 50%:50% read-write. In K2’s detailed SPC-2 report, one can see that for 100% write workload the K2 was averaging ~26GB/sec. while for the 100% read workload the K2 was averaging ~38GB/sec. and for the 50:50 read:write workload ~32GB/sec.

On the other hand the LDQ workload appears to be entirely sequential read-only but the report shows that this is made up of two workloads one using 1MB data transfers and the other using 64KB data transfers, with various numbers of streams fired up to generate  stress. The surprising item for K2’s LDQ run is that it did much better on the 64KB data streams than the 1MB data streams, an average of 41GB/sec vs. 32GB/sec.. This probably says something about an internal flash data transfer bottleneck at large data transfers someplace in the architecture.

The VOD workload also appears to be sequential, read-only and the report doesn’t indicate a data transfer size but given K2’s actual results, averaging ~31GB/sec it would seem to indicate it was on the order of 1MB.

So what we can tell is that K2’s SSD write throughput is worse than reads (~1/3rd worse) and relatively smaller sequential reads are better than relatively larger sequential reads (~1/4 better).  But I must add that even at the relatively “slower write throughput”, the K2 would still have beaten the next best disk-only storage system by ~10GB/sec.

Where’s the other all-flash SPC-2 benchmarks?

Prior to K2 there was only one other all-flash system (TMS RamSan-630) submission for SPC-2. I suspect that writing 26 GB/sec. to an all-flash system would be hazardous to its health and maybe other all-flash storage system vendors don’t want to encourage this type of activity.

Just for the record the K2 SPC-2 result has been submitted for “review” (as of 18Mar2014) and may be modified before finally “accepted”. However, the review process typically doesn’t impact performance results as much as other report items. So, officially, we will need to await for final acceptance before we can truly believe these numbers.

Comments?

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The complete SPC  performance report went out in SCI’s February 2014 newsletter.  But a copy of the report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime next quarter (if all goes well).  However, you can get the latest storage performance analysis now and subscribe to future free newsletters by just using the signup form above right.

Even more performance information and OLTP, Email and Throuphput ChampionCharts for Enterprise, Mid-range and SMB class storage systems are also available in SCI’s SAN Buying Guide, available for purchase from  website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our SPC  performance reports or any of our other storage performance analyses.

HP Tech Day – StoreServ Flash Optimizations

Attended HP Tech Field Day late last month in Disneyland. Must say the venue was the best ever for HP, and getting in on Nth Generation Conference was a plus. Sorry it has taken so long for me to get around to writing about it.

We spent a day going over HP’s new converged storage, software defined storage and other storage topics. HP has segmented the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) storage requirements into cost optimized, Software Defined Storage and SLA optimized, Service Refined Storage. Under Software Defined storage they talked about their StoreVirtual product line which is an outgrowth of the Lefthand Networks VSA, first introduced in 2007. This June, they extended SDS to include their StoreOnce VSA product to go after SMB and ROBO backup storage requirements.

We also discussed some of HP’s OpenStack integration work to integrate current HP block storage into OpenStack Cinder. They discussed some of the integrations they plan for file and object store as well.

However what I mostly want to discuss in this post is the session discussing how HP StoreServ 3PAR had optimized their storage system for flash.

They showed an SPC-1 chart depicting various storage systems IOPs levels and response times as they ramped from 10% to 100% of their IOPS rate. StoreServ 3PAR’s latest entry showed a considerable band of IOPS (25K to over 250K) all within a sub-msec response time range. Which was pretty impressive since at the time no other storage systems seemed able to do this for their whole range of IOPS. (A more recent SPC-1 result from HDS with an all-flash VSP with Hitachi Accelerated Flash also was able to accomplish this [sub-msec response time throughout their whole benchmark], only in their case it reached over 600K IOPS – read about this in our latest performance report in our newsletter, sign up above right).

  • Adaptive Read – As I understood it, this changed the size of backend reads to match the size requested by the front end. For disk systems, one often sees that a host read of say 4KB often causes a read of 16KB from the backend, with the assumption that the host will request additional data after the block read off of disk and 90% of the time spent to do a disk read is getting the head to the correct track and once there it takes almost no effort to read more data. However with flash, there is no real effort to get to a proper location to read a block of flash data and as such, there is no advantage to reading more data than the host requests, because if they come back for more one can immediately read from the flash again.
  • Adaptive Write – Similar to adaptive read, adaptive write only writes the changed data to flash. So if a host writes a 4KB block then 4KB is written to flash. This doesn’t help much for RAID 5 because of parity updates but for RAID 1 (mirroring) this saves on flash writes which ultimately lengthens flash life.
  • Adaptive Offload (destage) – This changes the frequency of destaging or flushing cache depending on the level of write activity. Slower destaging allows written (dirty) data to accumulate in cache if there’s not much write activity going on, which means in RAID 5 parity may not need to be updated as one could potentially accumulate a whole stripe’s worth of data in cache. In low-activity situations such destaging could occur every 200 msecs. whereas with high write activity destaging could occur as fast as every 3 msecs.
  • Multi-tennant IO processing – For disk drives, with sequential reads, one wants the largest stripes possible (due to head positioning penalty) but for SSDs one wants the smallest stripe sizes possible. The other problem with large stripe sizes is that devices are busy during the longer sized IO while performing the stripe writes (and reads). StoreServ modified the stripe size for SSDs to be 32KB so that other IO activity need not have to wait as long to get their turn in the (IO device) queue. The other advantage is when one is doing SSD rebuilds, with a 32KB stripe size one can intersperse more IO activity for the devices involved in the rebuild without impacting rebuild performance.

Of course the other major advantage of HP StoreServ’s 3PAR architecture provides for Flash is its intrinsic wide striping that’s done across a storage pool. This way all the SSDs can be used optimally and equally to service customer IOs.

I am certain there were other optimizations HP made to support SSDs in StoreServ storage, but these are the ones they were willing to talk publicly about.

No mention of when Memristor SSDs were going to be available but stay tuned, HP let slip that sooner or later Memristor Flash storage will be in HP storage & servers.

Comments?

Photo Credits: (c) 2013 Silverton Consulting, Inc

Has latency become the key metric? SPC-1 LRT results – chart of the month

I was at EMCworld a couple of months back and they were showing off a preview of the next version VNX storage, which was trying to achieve a million IOPS with under a millisecond latency.  Then I attended NetApp’s analyst summit and the discussion at their Flash seminar was how latency was changing the landscape of data storage and how flash latencies were going to enable totally new applications.

One executive at NetApp mentioned that IOPS was never the real problem. As an example, he mentioned one large oil & gas firm that had a peak IOPS of 35K.

Also, there was some discussion at NetApp of trying to come up with a way of segmenting customer applications by latency requirements.  Aside from high frequency trading applications, online payment processing and a few other high-performance database activities, there wasn’t a lot that could easily be identified/quantified today.

IO latencies have been coming down for years now. Sophisticated disk only storage systems have been lowering latencies for over a decade or more.   But since the introduction of SSDs it’s been a whole new ballgame.  For proof all one has to do is examine the top 10 SPC-1 LRT (least response time, measured with workloads@10% of peak activity) results.

Top 10 SPC-1 LRT results, SSD system response times

 

In looking over the top 10 SPC-1 LRT benchmarks (see Figure above) one can see a general pattern.  These systems mostly use SSD or flash storage except for TMS-400, TMS 320 (IBM FlashSystems) and Kaminario’s K2-D which primarily use DRAM storage and backup storage.

Hybrid disk-flash systems seem to start with an LRT of around 0.9 msec (not on the chart above).  These can be found with DotHill, NetApp, and IBM.

Similarly, you almost have to get to as “slow” as 0.93 msec. before you can find any disk only storage systems. But most disk only storage comes with a latency at 1msec or more. Between 1 and 2msec. LRT we see storage from EMC, HDS, HP, Fujitsu, IBM NetApp and others.

There was a time when the storage world was convinced that to get really good response times you had to have a purpose built storage system like TMS or Kaminario or stripped down functionality like IBM’s Power 595.  But it seems that the general purpose HDS HUS, IBM Storwize, and even Huawei OceanStore are all capable of providing excellent latencies with all SSD storage behind them. And all seem to do at least in the same ballpark as the purpose built, TMS RAMSAN-620 SSD storage system.  These general purpose storage systems have just about every advanced feature imaginable with the exception of mainframe attach.

It seems nowadays that there is a trifurcation of latency results going on, based on underlying storage:

  • DRAM only systems at 0.4 msec to ~0.1 msec.
  • SSD/flash only storage at 0.7 down to 0.2msec
  • Disk only storage at 0.93msec and above.

The hybrid storage systems are attempting to mix the economics of disk with the speed of flash storage and seem to be contending with all these single technology, storage solutions. 

It’s a new IO latency world today.  SSD only storage systems are now available from every major storage vendor and many of them are showing pretty impressive latencies.  Now with fully functional storage latency below 0.5msec., what’s the next hurdle for IT.

Comments?

Image: EAB 2006 by TMWolf

 

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SCI SPC-1 results analysis: Top 10 $/IOPS – chart-of-the-month

Column chart showing the top 10 economically performing systems for SPC-1
(SCISPC120226-003) (c) 2012 Silverton Consulting, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Lower is better on this chart.  I can’t remember the last time we showed this Top 10 $/IOPS™ chart from the Storage Performance Council SPC-1 benchmark.  Recall that we prefer our IOPS/$/GB which factors in subsystem size but this past quarter two new submissions ranked well on this metric.  The two new systems were the all SSD Huawei Symantec Oceanspace™ Dorado2100 (#2) and the latest Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 S2 storage (#7) subsystems.

Most of the winners on $/IOPS are SSD systems (#1-5 and 10) and most of these were all SSD storage system.  These systems normally have better $/IOPS by hitting high IOPS™ rates for the cost of their storage. But they often submit relatively small systems to SPC-1 reducing system cost and helping them place better on $/IOPS.

On the other hand, some disk only storage do well by abandoning any form of protection as with the two Sun J4400 (#6) and J4200 (#8) storage systems which used RAID 0 but also had smaller capacities, coming in at 2.2TB and 1.2TB, respectively.

The other two disk only storage systems here, the Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 S2 (#7) and the Huawei Symantec Oceanspace S2600 (#9) systems also had relatively small capacities at 9.7TB and 2.9TB respectively.

The ETERNUS DX80 S2 achieved ~35K IOPS and at a cost of under $80K generated a $2.25 $/IOPS.  Of course, the all SSD systems blow that away, for example the Oceanspace Dorado2100 (#2), all SSD system hit ~100K IOPS but cost nearly $90K for a $0.90 $/IOPS.

Moreover, the largest capacity system here with 23.7TB of storage was the Oracle Sun ZFS (#10) hybrid SSD and disk system which generated ~137K IOPS at a cost of ~$410K hitting just under $3.00 $/IOPS.

Still prefer our own metric on economical performance but each has their flaws.  The SPC-1 $/IOPS metric is dominated by SSD systems and our IOPS/$/GB metric is dominated by disk only systems.   Probably some way to do better on the cost of performance but I have yet to see it.

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The full SPC performance report went out in SCI’s February newsletter.  But a copy of the full report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime next month (if all goes well). However, you can get the full SPC performance analysis now and subscribe to future free newsletters by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of current SAN or block storage performance covering SPC-1 (top 30), SPC-2 (top 30) and ESRP (top 20) results please see SCI’s SAN Storage Buying Guide available on our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our analysis of SPC results or any of our other storage performance analyses.

 

Storage performance matters, even for smartphones

Portrait of a Young Girl With an iPhone, after Agnolo Bronzino by Mike Licht,...  (cc) (From Flickr)
Portrait of a Young Girl With an iPhone, after Agnolo Bronzino by Mike Licht,... (cc) (From Flickr)

 

Read an interesting article from MIT’s Technical Review about a study presented at last weeks Usenix FAST (File and Storage Technology) conference on How Data Storage Cripples Mobile Apps.  It seems storage performance can seriously slow down smartphone functioning, not unlike IT applications (see IO throughput vs. response time and why it matters post for more).

The smartphone research was done by NEC.  They took an Android phone and modified  the O/S to use an external memory card for all of the App data needs.

Then they ran a number of Apps through their paces with various external memory cards.  It turned out that depending on the memory card in use, the mobile phones email and Twitter Apps launched 2-3X faster.   Also, the native web App was tested with over 50 pages loads and had at best, a 3X faster page load time.

All the tests were done using a cable to simulate advanced network connections, above and beyond today’s capabilities and to eliminate that as the performance bottleneck.  In the end, faster networking didn’t have as much of a bearing on App performance as memory card speed.

(NAND) memory card performance

The problem, it turns out is due to data writes.  It seems that the non-volatile memory used in most external memory cards is NAND flash, which as is we all know, has much slower write time than read time, almost 1000X  (see my post on Why SSD performance is such a mystery).  Most likely the memory cards are pretty “dumb” so many performance boosting techniques used in enterprise class SSDs are not available (e.g., DRAM write buffering).

Data caching helps

The researchers did another experiment with the phone, using a more sophisticated version of data caching and a modified Facebook App.  Presumably, this new “data caching” minimized the data write penalty by caching writes to DRAM first and only destaging data to NAND flash when absolutely necessary.   By using the more sophisticated “data caching” they were able to speed up the modified Facebook App by 4X.

It seems that storage sophistication matters even in smartphones, I think I am going to  need to have someone port the caching portions of Data ONTAP® or Enginuity™ to run on my iPhone.

Comments?

 

Why EMC is doing Project Lightening and Thunder

Picture of atmospheric lightening striking ground near a building at night
rayo 3 by El Garza (cc) (from Flickr)

Although technically Project Lightening and Thunder represent some interesting offshoots of EMC software, hardware and system prowess,  I wonder why they would decide to go after this particular market space.

There are plenty of alternative offerings in the PCIe NAND memory card space.  Moreover, the PCIe card caching functionality, while interesting is not that hard to replicate and such software capability is not a serious barrier of entry for HP, IBM, NetApp and many, many others.  And the margins cannot be that great.

So why get into this low margin business?

I can see a couple of reasons why EMC might want to do this.

  • Believing in the commoditization of storage performance.  I have had this debate with a number of analysts over the years but there remain many out there that firmly believe that storage performance will become a commodity sooner, rather than later.  By entering the PCIe NAND card IO buffer space, EMC can create a beachhead in this movement that helps them build market awareness, higher manufacturing volumes, and support expertise.  As such, when the inevitable happens and high margins for enterprise storage start to deteriorate, EMC will be able to capitalize on this hard won, operational effectiveness.
  • Moving up the IO stack.  From an applications IO request to the disk device that actually services it is a long journey with multiple places to make money.  Currently, EMC has a significant share of everything that happens after the fabric switch whether it is FC,  iSCSI, NFS or CIFS.  What they don’t have is a significant share in the switch infrastructure or anywhere on the other (host side) of that interface stack.  Yes they have Avamar, Networker, Documentum, and other software that help manage, secure and protect IO activity together with other significant investments in RSA and VMware.   But these represent adjacent market spaces rather than primary IO stack endeavors.  Lightening represents a hybrid software/hardware solution that moves EMC up the IO stack to inside the server.  As such, it represents yet another opportunity to profit from all the IO going on in the data center.
  • Making big data more effective.  The fact that Hadoop doesn’t really need or use high end storage has not been lost to most storage vendors.  With Lightening, EMC has a storage enhancement offering that can readily improve  Hadoop cluster processing.  Something like Lightening’s caching software could easily be tailored to enhance HDFS file access mode and thus, speed up cluster processing.  If Hadoop and big data are to be the next big consumer of storage, then speeding cluster processing will certainly help and profiting by doing this only makes sense.
  • Believing that SSDs will transform storage. To many of us the age of disks is waning.  SSDs, in some form or another, will be the underlying technology for the next age of storage.  The densities, performance and energy efficiency of current NAND based SSD technology are commendable but they will only get better over time.  The capabilities brought about by such technology will certainly transform the storage industry as we know it, if they haven’t already.  But where SSD technology actually emerges is still being played out in the market place.  Many believe that when industry transitions like this happen it’s best to be engaged everywhere change is likely to happen, hoping that at least some of them will succeed. Perhaps PCIe SSD cards may not take over all server IO activity but if it does, not being there or being late will certainly hurt a company’s chances to profit from it.

There may be more reasons I missed here but these seem to be the main ones.  Of the above, I think the last one, SSD rules the next transition is most important to EMC.

They have been successful in the past during other industry transitions.  If anything they have shown similar indications with their acquisitions by buying into transitions if they don’t own them, witness Data Domain, RSA, and VMware.  So I suspect the view in EMC is that doubling down on SSDs will enable them to ride out the next storm and be in a profitable place for the next change, whatever that might be.

And following lightening, Project Thunder

Similarly, Project Thunder seems to represent EMC doubling their bet yet again on the SSDs.  Just about every month I talk to another storage startup coming out in the market providing another new take on storage using every form of SSD imaginable.

However, Project Thunder as envisioned today is not storage, but rather some form of external shared memory.  I have heard this before, in the IBM mainframe space about 15-20 years ago.  At that time shared external memory was going to handle all mainframe IO processing and the only storage left was going to be bulk archive or migration storage – a big threat to the non-IBM mainframe storage vendors at the time.

One problem then was that the shared DRAM memory of the time was way more expensive than sophisticated disk storage and the price wasn’t coming down fast enough to counteract increased demand.  The other problem was making shared memory work with all the existing mainframe applications was not easy.  IBM at least had control over the OS, HW and most of the larger applications at the time.  Yet they still struggled to make it usable and effective, probably some lesson here for EMC.

Fast forward 20 years and NAND based SSDs are the right hardware technology to make  inexpensive shared memory happen.  In addition, the road map for NAND and other SSD technologies looks poised to continue the capacity increase and price reductions necessary to compete effectively with disk in the long run.

However, the challenges then and now seem as much to do with software that makes shared external memory universally effective as with the hardware technology to implement it.  Providing a new storage tier in Linux, Windows and/or VMware is easier said than done. Most recent successes have usually been offshoots of SCSI (iSCSI, FCoE, etc).  Nevertheless, if it was good for mainframes then, it certainly good for Linux, Windows and VMware today.

And that seems to be where Thunder is heading, I think.

Comments?

 

Comments?