Got SPDK Questions?

We kicked-off our 2020 webcast program by diving into how The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) fits in the NVMe landscape. Our SPDK experts, Jim Harris and Ben Walker, did an outstanding job presenting on this topic. In fact, their webcast, “Where Does SPDK Fit in the NVMe-oF Landscape” received at 4.9 rating on a scale of 1-5 from the live audience. If you missed the webcast, I highly encourage you to watch it on-demand. We had some great questions from the attendees and here are answers to them all: Q. Which CPU architectures does SPDK support? Read More

The Ins and Outs of a Scale-Out File System Architecture

To meet the increasingly higher demand on both capacity and performance in large cluster computing environments, the storage subsystem has evolved toward a modular and scalable design. The scale-out file system has emerged as one implementation of the trend, in addition to scale-out object and block storage solutions. What are the key principles when architecting a scale-out file system? Find out on February 28th when the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosts The Scale-Out File System Architecture Overview, a live webcast where we will present an overview of scale-out file system architectures. This presentation will provide an introduction to scale-out-file systems and cover: Read More

File, Block and Object Storage: Real-world Questions, Expert Answers

More than 1,200 people have already watched our Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) Great Storage Debate webcast “File vs. Block vs. Object Storage.” If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s available on demand. This great debate generated many interesting questions. As promised, our experts have answered them all here. Q. What about the encryption technologies on file storage? Do they exist, and how do they affect the performance compared to unencrypted storage? Read More

An FAQ to Make Your Storage System Hum

In our most recent “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcast series – Part Sepia – Getting from Here to There, we discussed terms and concepts that have a profound impact on storage design and performance. If you missed the live event, I encourage you to check it our on-demand. We had many great questions on encapsulation, tunneling, IOPS, latency, jitter and quality of service (QoS). As promised, our experts have gotten together to answer them all. Read More

SNIA Storage Developer Conference-The Knowledge Continues

SNIA’s 18th Storage Developer Conference is officially a success, with 124 general and breakout sessions;  Cloud Interoperability, Kinetiplugfest 5c Storage, and SMB3 plugfests; ten Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions, and amazing networking among 450+ attendees.  Sessions on NVMe over Fabrics won the title of most attended, but Persistent Memory, Object Storage, and Performance were right behind.  Many thanks to SDC 2016 Sponsors, who engaged attendees in exciting technology discussions.

For those not familiar with SDC, this technical industry event is designed for a variety of storage technologists at various levels from developers to architects to product managers and more.  And, true to SNIA’s commitment to educating the industry on current and future disruptive technologies, SDC content is now available to all – whether you attended or not – for download and viewing.

20160919_120059You’ll want to stream keynotes from Citigroup, Toshiba, DSSD, Los Alamos National Labs, Broadcom, Microsemi, and Intel – they’re available now on demand on SNIA’s YouTube channel, SNIAVideo.

All SDC presentations are now available for download; and over the next few months, you can continue to download SDC podcasts which combine audio and slides. The first podcast from SDC 2016 – on hyperscaler (as well as all 2015 SDC Podcasts) are available here, and more will be available in the coming weeks.

SNIA thanks all its members and colleagues who contributed to make SDC a success! A special thanks goes out to the SNIA Technical Council, a select group of acknowledged industry experts who work to guide SNIA technical efforts. In addition to driving the agenda and content for SDC, the Technical Council oversees and manages SNIA Technical Work Groups, reviews architectures submitted by Work Groups, and is the SNIA’s technical liaison to standards organizations. Learn more about these visionary leaders at http://www.snia.org/about/organization/tech_council.

And finally, don’t forget to mark your calendars now for SDC 2017 – September 11-14, 2017, again at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. Watch for the Call for Presentations to open in February 2017.

Clustered File Systems: No Limits

Today’s storage world would appear to have been divided into three major and mutually exclusive categories: block, file and object storage. The marketing that shapes much of the user demand would appear to suggest that these are three quite distinct animals, and many systems are sold as exclusively either SAN for block, NAS for file or object. And object is often conflated with cloud, a consumption model that can in reality be block, file or object.

A fixed taxonomy that divides the storage world this way is very limiting, and can be confusing; for instance, when we talk about cloud. How should providers and users buy and consume their storage? Are there other classifications that might help in providing storage solutions to meet specific or more general application needs? What about customers who need file access performance beyond what one storage box can provide? Which options support those who want scale-out solution like object storage with file protocol semantics?

To clear up the confusion, the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum is hosting a live Webcast, “Clustered File Systems: No Limits.” In this Webcast we will explore clustered storage solutions that not only provide multiple end users access to shared storage over a network, but allow the storage itself to be distributed and managed over multiple discrete storage systems. You’ll hear:

  • General principles and specific clustered and distributed systems and the facilities they provide built on the underlying storage
  • Better known file systems like NFS, IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS) and Lustre, along with a few of the less well known
  • How object based systems like S3 have blurred the lines between them and traditional file based solutions

This Webcast should appeal to those interested in exploring some of the different ways of accessing & managing storage, and how that might affect how storage systems are provisioned and consumed. POSIX and other acronyms may be mentioned, but no rocket science beyond a general understanding of the principles of storage will be assumed. Contains no nuts and is suitable for vegans!

As always, our experts will be on hand to answer your questions on the spot. Register now for this October 25th event.

 

Podcasts Bring the Sounds of SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference to Your Car, Boat, Train, or Plane!

SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference (SDC) offers exactly what a developer of cloud, solid state, security, analytics, or big data applications is looking  for – rich technical content delivered in a no-vendor bias manner by today’s leading technologists.  The 2016 SDC agenda is being compiled, but now yousdc podcast pic can get a “sound bite” of what to expect by downloading  SDC podcasts via iTunes, or visiting the SDC Podcast site at http://www.snia.org/podcasts to download the accompanying slides and/or listen to the MP3 version.

Each podcast has been selected by the SNIA Technical Council from the 2015 SDC event, and include topics like:

  • Preparing Applications for Persistent Memory from Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • Managing the Next Generation Memory Subsystem from Intel Corporation
  • NVDIMM Cookbook – a Soup to Nuts Primer on Using NVDIMMs to Improve Your Storage Performance from AgigA Tech and Smart Modular Systems
  • Standardizing Storage Intelligence and the Performance and Endurance Enhancements It Provides from Samsung Corporation
  • Object Drives, a New Architectural Partitioning from Toshiba Corporation
  • Shingled Magnetic Recording- the Next Generation of Storage Technology from HGST, a Western Digital Company
  • SMB 3.1.1 Update from Microsoft

Eight podcasts are now available, with new ones added each week all the way up to SDC 2016 which begins September 19 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.  Keep checking the SDC Podcast website, and remember that registration is now open for the 2016 event at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer/registration.  The SDC conference agenda will be up soon at the home page of http://www.storagedeveloper.org.

Enjoy these great technical sessions, no matter where you may be!

A Q&A on Storage Performance Benchmarking: Block Components

For the third time, our storage performance benchmarking experts, Ken Cantrell and Mark Rogov, have generated an abundance of interest (in the form of questions) on block storage performance. If you missed the Webcast, “Storage Performance Benchmarking: Block Components,” it’s available on demand. It was no small effort to answer all the great questions that we received. And for those of you who have been waiting, we apologize, but we think the detailed and thoughtful answers Mark and Ken have put together are well worth the wait.

Q1: Are these numbers applicable to the 90th percentile for any given storage array, please?

Mark: These numbers represent HDD/SSD performance numbers. They aren’t meant to represent any particular storage array vendor’s performance. See the end of our presentation (bottleneck analysis) as to why it is really really hard to answer your question.

Q2: How about NVDIMM-F or NVDIMM-P or NVDIMM-X claiming 3-4M IOPS type of Enterprise storage devices?

Ken: Yup. They’re fast.

There’s a great presentation by Jim Handy titled “Understanding the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint Memory” presented at SDC2015 that I’d recommend you take a look at to understand more about this kind of memory and its possible positioning.

Mark: Great question. I think the conclusion of our presentation answers it. Flash (and we use flash as a collective term, defining everything that is not spinning storage to be “flash”) is drastically faster than spinning drives. But even within Flash, there are plenty of new technologies which compete with each other and improve the overall performance landscape. So, within the scope of our presentation, even a simple good old SLC drive tops the capability of a SAS line. If we improve on one drive, by switching the technology to a faster/newer/better variant (e.g., NVDIMM-F), or by stacking the drives, the resulting set will much more likely expose the limitations of the “regular” storage array.

Q3: I’d like to know which tool you are using to measure IOPS if possible. 

Ken: The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) has developed substantial expertise in the area of SSD performance and behavior. The SSS Performance Test Specifications were developed by the SNIA SSS Technical Work Group (TWG) and define how to measure SSD performance in a manner that is accurate, repeatable and enables comparison between different manufacturers’ products. Learn more about the SSD Performance Project here.

All of the Flash and HDD numbers at the beginning of the presentation were taken directly from the Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification summary results (SSS PTS). The SSS PTS provides a comprehensive method for measuring flash performance in the most vendor neutral approach that I’ve seen.

The Flash and HDD numbers at the end of the presentation were 80% of the starting numbers – scaled down to make them slightly more like what we’ve seen in a greater number of environments (that aren’t pushing their drives as hard).

Q4: Throughputs with SSD is not as much as one can get from a spinning drive when one keeps cost/GB on the axis. Comments please.

Ken: Now we have 3 axes? I’m not even sure how to visualize what you’re asking, but I’m pretty sure I understand the intent … and this is a harder question than it would appear on the surface. Why?

  • First off, prices aren’t my thing – I tend to focus on the internals and let the sales guys talk prices. Additionally, vendors often engage in significant discounting or bundling that makes it difficult for the average person (i.e., me) to understand true costs.
  • The astounding random I/O performance of flash enables support for compression and deduplication without dramatically increasing client-perceived latency. There’s a reason you see so many vendors offering inline deduplication and inline compression now when they did not even five years ago – flash is the enabler that makes this happen. So what is the true comparison? Raw HDD vs Raw flash? Or Raw HDD vs flash plus the storage efficiency (SE) savings it enables? If flash with SE features (dedupe and compression), then what is the savings that you can/should expect for your dataset? 1.5x? 5x? 50x? Knowing this is a prerequisite to answering the question, and the answer will be dependent both on the vendor’s features and your own data set characteristics.
  • As we discussed in the first session, if your application/user base have some sort of minimum performance expectations, particularly around latency, then HDDs may simply not be able to provide you the performance you need. You DID mention throughput (IOPS?) explicitly and with IOPS, OPS, or data rates (MB/s), you can always match flash data rates with HDDs – it just might take a LOT more HDD drives than flash devices. Latency/response time is different though – depending on whether you are drive bound and what your I/O characteristics look like (read vs write, random vs sequential), you may simply be unable to ever hit your latency targets with HDD.
  • The world, it is a-changing. six years ago it was easy to say “SSD for performance sensitive niche applications!” and smile. Today, prices continue to drop, vendors are making new decisions around the use of consumer grade vs enterprise grade flash, and overall flash/SSD is moving much more mainstream. And … consider the new 16TB (yes 16 TERABYTE) SSD drives announced by Samsung. My personal view (and I’m explicitly disclaiming that I’m speaking on my behalf, and not NetApp’s – which honestly, you should assume for all my answers) is that these are going to change the landscape almost as dramatically as SSD itself has.
  • There are definitely vendors that believe in the cost benefits of HDD. We chose not to mention specific vendors in the webcast, but consider BackBlaze. In their blog, they are extremely open about how they have configured their data center – and they are an (all?) HDD shop. In fact, “by the end of 2015, the Backblaze datacenter had 56,224 spinning hard drives containing customer data.” Speaking of Backblaze, you might be interested in their assessment of the 16TB drive, for their shop.

You might also be interested in slide 21 of the following, which includes some price/performance numbers from EMC and Oracle.

Q5: Does NVMe drive technology move things to a higher level?

Ken: If you truly mean NAND-based flash accessed via NVMe instead of SAS/SATA, yes. Look at the perf results linked out of question 3. If you mean the use of next-generation non-volatile memory (NVM) instead of NAND-based flash, then yes. The following chart is contained in a lot of SNIA presentations; I It does a good job of pointing out just how much faster we can get.

I also strongly recommend a look through of Advances in Non-Volatile Storage Technologies by Tom Coughlin from Coughlin Associates. If you care about these topics, the SNIA Storage Developer Conference is a great opportunity to learn more.

 

Performance Benchmarking 3 Graphic

Q6: Why NAND gates and not AND gates?

Mark: NAND and NOR gates are known as “universal gates”–they can be combined in various groups and combinations to do any basic operations, i.e., AND, NOT, OR, etc. So, flash manufacturers had to choose between NAND and NOR. And just like with any technology, the price drove the choice. NAND gates are simply cheaper and slower. NORs are faster and more expensive. Actually, there are some NOR products in the market.

Q7: Mark accidently said 15K was 15,000/sec when it’s 15,000/minute.

Ken: Thanks! (Shame on you Mark!)

Mark: Thank you… I can’t believe that I misspoke! I never do! Never! Ahh!!!

Mark’s Lawyer: On behalf of my client, I move to remove this question and the digital recording from Exhibit A to Exhibit B (aka “never again section”)

Q8: Do you guys have any data about how expensive an erase-modify-write operation is, compared with spinning disks in terms of performance?

Ken: This is what we were attempting to demonstrate in the first set of slides. The PTS (see question 3) forces flash devices into a steady state mode where they are continuously doing program-erase cycles. So the results shown there demonstrate the difference between HDD writes (seek, spin, write) and flash writes (erase and program).

Your question made me wonder though … so I also did a quick literature search. Interesting to see how rates have changed over time, and how they vary by device:

From M-Systems, in 2002: Erase cycle was 3ms

From Micron, in 2006: The erase time for a 128KB erase block was 500 µs

From AnandTech, in 2012: Erase time for SLC was 1.5-2ms, MLC was 3ms and TLC was ~4.5ms (huh? SLC vs MLC vs TLC?)

Q9: Why can’t the pointer be at the page level instead of a block level (say, metadata within a block)? I’m sure that there is a reason. What do we gain by treating an entire block as a monolithic?

Mark: This is an excellent question to ask Google. I think the reasons for selecting a NAND gate technology, and for bundling a bunch of NAND gates into groups and for creating blocks (in essence, super groups) is power. It takes less power to operate the drives with NAND gates and blocks.

Q10: I heard someone mention NOR gates, instead of NAND, are NOR gates persistent, over a power cycle?

Ken. Yes.

Mark: There are plenty of other “Logic gates” see this article on Wikipedia for more information.

Q11: So, there is no advantage in keeping IO sequentially in an SSD?

Ken: Technically, or practically? Technically speaking, I think it does matter. Micron documented this in 2006, noting that “Random access time on NOR Flash is specified at 0.075μs; on NAND Flash, random access time for the first byte only is significantly slower—25μs (see Table 2 on page 5). However, after initial access has been made, the remaining 2111 bytes are shifted out of NAND at a mere 0.025μs per byte.” The raw numbers have changed over the years, but I don’t believe the principle has. Violin Memory stated in 2013 that, “The idea of sequential I/O doesn’t exist with flash memory, because there is no physical concept of blocks being adjacent or contiguous. Logically, two blocks may have consecutive block addresses, but this has no bearing on where the actual information is electronically stored. You might therefore say that all flash I/O is random, but in truth the principles of random I/O versus sequential I/O are disk concepts so they don’t really apply.”

Practically speaking, I agree. Sequential vs random I/O is irrelevant for flash. Given (a) average I/O sizes for workloads and (b) the incredible performance of flash devices compared to the needs of the vast majority of people using them, it doesn’t much matter if you can access subsequent bytes in a NAND-based flash device faster than you can access the first bytes. They are plenty fast enough.

Note that it is hard to find public info on this. Sequential I/O tends to use larger I/O sizes, and random I/O uses smaller I/O sizes. So finding apples-to-apples comparisons between sequential and random I/O is difficult.

Mark: Yes, the flash drive doesn’t care anymore. But the hosts and application still do. Where it matters is in the workloads. Ken and I are still planning to dedicate an entire hour talking about workloads, and Random vs. Sequential will surely be a large part of it. However, we will admit that in the future, when all storage will be flash (which is, of course, a pipe dream) it won’t matter anymore.

Q12: What is the acceptance level to Erasure Coding, and hence the change in the way Storage Performance testing will change?

Mark: As we said during the webcast, RAID is a special case of Erasure Coding. Therefore its acceptance rate is 100% J But on a more serious note, Erasure Coding is necessary for any scale out system: and every vendor uses their own N+M rules.

Q13: Is RAID-1 always half the write performance? If the writes go to both drives simultaneously, I could see write performance being less than 100% of what one drive can do, but not half.

Ken: This was asked in a dry run as well. You’ve hit on something that seems to be a sticking point for multiple people. Perhaps consider it this way. It looks mathy and complicated, but bear with me …

Consider two physical drives. Call them P1 and P2.

Let the write performance (in iops) of P1 be P1w.

Let the write performance (in iops) of P2 be P2w.

How fast can P1 write? P1w.

How fast can P2 write? P2w.

If you can write to both P1 and P2 at the same time, independently, and completely in parallel, how fast can you write in aggregate? P1w + P2w.

For the previous question, what if P1w = P2w?

Then P1w + P2w = P1w + P1w = (2)*P1w.

Now …

Consider a RAID-1 pair comprised of the same P1 and P2. Call it R1.

Writes can be sent (in a good implementation) to both P1 and P2 at the same time.

But, before a write is considered complete, it must be acknowledged by BOTH P1 and P2.

If P1w > P2w, what is the best performance of R1? P2w. P2 is slower, so we’ll always be waiting on it (assuming performance is consistent), so the best we can do is P2w.

Same logic if P1w < P2w.

What if P1w = P2w? What is the best performance of R1? Same logic … but since they are the same speed, it is simply P1w.

So …

In the non-RAID-1 case, our performance (assuming P1w = P2w) was 2 * P1w.

In the RAID-1 case, our performance (assuming P1w = P2w) is P1w.

50% reduction.

RAID-1 only achieves ½ of what the physical pair could. 

Mark: What Ken said.

Q14: Is there any kind of “asynch” RAID1 so that I can keep the performance of the disks but keep the mirroring?

Ken: See the previous answer also.

For reads, certainly. For writes, not that I know of, although you can make it much less visible. For example, if you have a caching RAID controller/system, your writes will go to memory and then go to disk whenever the controller/system decides to flush it. Perhaps it is big enough that it turns random I/O into sequential I/O (and you’re on HDDs) and the perf improvement from doing sequential instead (instead of random) is enough you don’t notice the effect of RAID itself.

Mark: I think that in reality, the behavior of a particular implementation is always vendor-dependent. Generally speaking, RAID1 does allow the reading from both drives, but budgets or software bugs or just plain ignorance could result in an implementation where that is not true. Address vendor documentation to know for sure.

Q15: Why do you need to read old parity to recalculate and write a new one? Isn’t the parity only calculated based on the data being written?

Ken: See answer to question #14.

Mark: It is a math trick… reading the parity saves reading the rest of the blocks on the full stripe. With 3 drives the savings are non-obvious, but with 5 or 14 there are significant.

Q16: This calculation is correct for 3 disks, right? If there are more disks and partial write is for stripe on single drive then you need to read more to calculate parity

Ken: No. There are some great write-ups about how RAID-5 works. Instead of pasting those here, I strongly encourage you to visit http://rickardnobel.se/how-raid5-works/ AND http://rickardnobel.se/raid-5-write-penalty/ and then tweet Mark (@markrogov) or Ken (@kencantrelljr) with questions/follow-up.

(I have no connection to Rickard … I just think he’s done a great job in his write-up.)

Mark: Yes, Rickard’s write up is spot on. Our goal is to introduce a fairly complex subject in a deceivingly simple manner. There are many edge cases that we don’t address: partial write to sector, partial write to a block, partial write a stripe… all those have their own consequences, and storage vendors deal with those differently.

Q17: I am also interested in Data Recovery on NAND technology

Ken: Me too. It isn’t a topic we’re planning to cover though.

Q18: Does caching write data help when one uses SSD?

Ken: It can. Memory is still faster than flash. It depends entirely on how the memory is used. For example, with writes, if memory were used as a write-through cache (look it up if you need), it wouldn’t make things faster. If it were used as a write-back cache, it would. If it is used as a read cache, it will almost certainly make reads of data faster. But even there, life is never simple. Why? Because if you’re using memory to cache data, you’re not using it for something else … and it is possible that the memory could be better used for caching metadata, for example.

Mark: Here, I’d like to recall our good friend, Dr. J Metz, who created an excellent presentation on comparing computer caches to pizza delivery in “Life of a Storage Packet (Walk)” And in his example, caching will keep the pizza warmer. Even if a flash drive is used.

Q19: If the customer is interested in throughput in MB/s then they probably won’t do IOs with 4KB size…

Ken: Agreed. I’m fairly certain that you’re referring to adding MB/s numbers on slide 41. We had a discussion about doing that when putting the slides together. The transition between slide 40 and 42 changed the I/O size from 4KiB to 128KiB, changed from writes to reads, and changed from random I/O to sequential I/O. Adding the MB/s numbers to slide 40/41 was meant to ease the transition between slide 40 and 42. You’re absolutely right though … rarely does anyone want to talk data rates (MB/s) when using small I/O sizes.

Mark: Agreed. Although a true performance guru would recognize that these are the two sides of the same coin.

Storage Performance Benchmarking Q&A – Take 2

Our recent Ethernet Storage Forum Webcast, “Storage Performance Benchmarking: Part 2,” has already been viewed by more than 500 people. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s now available on –demand. Our expert presenters, Ken Cantrell and Mark Rogov did a great job fielding questions during the live event, but of course there wasn’t time to get to them all. So, as promised here are their answers to all of them. If you have additional questions or thoughts, please comment on this blog and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Q: “As an example, am I right to presume workloads are generated by VMs”

A: Ken: It is probably a good idea at this point to define a workload, since we continue to use the term. At a very high level, think of a workload as the mix of operations issued by an application related to the accessing of data. In our case, data stored or made available by a storage solution. With that in mind, absolutely, workloads can be generated by VMs. But they don’t have to be. In other words, “it depends.”

For example, consider these 3 cases:

1) If your SUT (solution under test) was just a simple laptop with no hypervisor and a traditional OS, then there would be no VM in the mix. Your workload would be generated by the application you were measuring (whether that was a simple file copy or something complex like a local database installation).

2) Your SUT is composed of a physical client (like the laptop above) attached to a machine with a hypervisor installed on it and a local guest OS installation that is capable of exporting NFS or SMB shares. The laptop sends I/O via Ethernet to the guest OS. In this example, there is a VM, but it is acting as the storage system, not the workload generator.

3) Now reverse the I/O of example 2. Have the laptop export an SMB share and have the guest OS issue I/Os to that share. Now you finally have VMs generating workloads.

A: Mark: If one examines the solution under test (SUT), and considers the general data flow, then the workload is generated by the clients/hosts layer. Yes, we indicated that the clients/hosts can be VMs, but they also could be physical systems, and, in the case of a SUT consisting of just one laptop, the workload is generated by the application.

Q: Are you going to get around to file performance benchmarking? This infrastructure stuff is not new to me. I have done block all my life, I am interested in stuff about file.

A: Ken: That’s the plan. We are still working out the exact sequence, timing and content for future presentations, but had a dedicated section on both block and file on the original roadmap. If you have specific topics within “file” that you’d like covered, respond in the comments. No promises to cover them, but knowing the desires of the audience is always a good thing.

Keep in mind the intention of the webcast series – lay a strong, but simple foundation, for storage performance fundamentals and then build on that foundation.

A: Mark: The main intent of the series is to lay down basic performance principles first, then build on them to go to more complex topics. Both Ken and I refer to ourselves as “File Heads” and we can’t wait to concentrate on just file, but it would only make sense given that the infrastructure foundations are firm and understood by our audience.

Q: Why doesn’t SPEC SFS have performance testing for such failure models?

A: Ken: Brighttalk provided this comment in isolation, so it isn’t entirely clear which failure models you’re asking for.  I’m assuming you mean a failure like a drive or controller failure. With that assumption, that said, the SFS subcommittee welcomes publications that illustrate a failure condition. SPEC SFS 2014 provides an excellent opportunity for someone to publish once in a non-failure scenario and then again in a failure condition of some sort – as long as that failure condition doesn’t violate any of the run rules regarding stable storage and the failure condition doesn’t generate user visible errors.

Note that SPEC SFS 2014 doesn’t mandate any demonstration of failure scenarios. We’ve discussed this in the past, but it has never been a priority for those that participate in SPEC (which is open to all – see http://www.spec.org for instructions on how to join the SPEC Open Systems Group).

Q: Why is write cache turned off for enterprise drives?

A: Ken: I knew this question was coming. :) This is related to “stable storage” – the guarantee from your storage provider that data they say is safely stored on disk is actually stored on disk. I should clarify that the comment is a little dated and refers to caches designed around volatile memory; this wouldn’t apply to a hybrid SSD/spinning media drive that used the SSD to cache/stage data, since SSDs are non-volatile.

Consider the failure scenario where the enterprise drive has write caching enabled and then experiences a power failure. In most every system sold, the storage controller treats drives pretty much as black boxes – they tell the drive to read or write data at a certain location and expect the drive to do as told. So, when the drive says “yup, I got that data, you’re good!” the storage solution trusts the drive and, when it doesn’t need it in memory any longer, throws it away (that data is safely stored on disk, so this is ok). If the drive chose to cache that information in volatile memory, and loses power, the information is gone.

Midrange and enterprise storage vendors often (I think I can say generally) provide some sort of battery backup in case of power failures. These battery units keep power to at least some of the drives – but remember that drives (especially spinning ones) suck down a lot of power, and often the implementation chooses to keep power only to certain drives that the storage controller uses to flush its own volatile memory structures to.

A quick Internet search shows some specific comments on this topic:

From Seagate (http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/187751en):

Windows 2000 Professional / Server, Windows XP Home / Professional, Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a nifty little feature called write caching buried within the depths of property tabs. Normally, this type of feature is used with SCSI drives in server applications to provide greater data integrity.

When drives employ write-back cache, any interruption of power to the drive or system may cause lost or corrupted data because the drive does not have time to write the cached data to the disk before the power is lost. However, when write cache is turned off, drive performance slows down.

From Microsoft (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/259716):

…In addition, enabling disk write caching may increase operating system performance. This article describes how to enable or disable disk write caching…

NOTE: Enabling write caching generates the following warning. This is normal:

By enabling write caching, file system corruption and/or data loss could occur if the machine experiences a power, device or system failure and cannot be shutdown properly.

Q: What’s the difference between CPU and ASIC? When to use which word?

A: Ken: Unfortunately, the SNIA dictionary doesn’t define either term. At the easiest level, both are acronyms. CPU = central processing unit, and ASIC = application specific integrated circuit. At the next level, think of a CPU as general purpose processing element and an ASIC as a custom designed microchip designed for a special application or purpose. Once created, ASICs are non-programmable – they do something very specific (and hopefully very well and very quickly/efficiently). A CPU can run your bitcoin mining program overnight, wake you to Spotify in the morning, let you use your favorite word processor in between games of Plants vs. Zombies, and still let you watch Hulu before you head off to bed.

An ASIP (Application Specific Instruction-Set Processor) bridges the gap between a general purpose processor (CPU) and the highly specific, targeted design of an ASIC. An ASIP will have a much reduced instruction set and a more targeted design towards a specific application (say, digital signal processing), but still allow the execution of a specific instruction set given to it.

Q: Can you mention tools to identify the bottlenecks?

A: Ken: We are trying very hard, particularly in the webcasts themselves, to stay vendor neutral. I don’t mind violating that though here in the Q&A a little bit.

From an open source standpoint, there are a number of tools. One of the more popular now is to use something like Graphana as a front-end to Graphite, and use that to monitor a set of open source (or privately designed) sensors, including sensors from OPM below, that you place throughout your environment.

Here are a few other open-source benchmarking and performance tools, and what aspect of performance to which they apply. Please note that this is not a comprehensive list, nor is this a recommendation for their use. We are providing the link as a convenience, not an endorsement. [http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php]

Still free, but NetApp-centric, is OnCommand Performance Manager (OPM), specifically OPM v2.0 and later. In addition to providing performance metrics for your NetApp storage array, OPM offers up the concept of a “bully” and “victim” scenario – it specifically watches for components that are performing poorly (the “victims”) and helps identify which other components are causing that poor behavior (the “bullies”). My team helps develop OPM.

Not free, and not NetApp centric, but a NetApp product, is OnCommand Insight (OCI). This is a premier product for looking at the performance of the components across your datacenter.

A: Mark: I didn’t want to break the vouch to neutrality. :) EMC has a number of tools as well, vRealize suite, ViPR SRM, Unisphere, plus platform specific tools… However, it has been my experience that the most important tool a performance expert has is still the critical mind. One observes the problem, and then walks the entire set of the SUT layers looking for incongruences. Too often, the perceived bottleneck is not the problem, but a manifestation of a problem somewhere else. For example, as we pointed in the “MiB/s section” of this webcast, the network layer was a bottleneck due to the badly configured OS multipath drivers. Deciphering cause from reason requires several things: a good understanding of the SUT and its layers; a critical mind to analyze problem conditions; and a large dose of curiosity. The latter one a personal trait that drives us to question “what if I change this to that?” Asking questions while troubleshooting is, IMHO, a cornerstone requirement and inherently, a very human trait. My personal view is that tools are just tools, and they require a human hand to operate and a human mind to analyze the results.

Q: Did All flash arrays almost eliminate bottleneck..,at least the Storage controller bottleneck can be eliminated if enterprise can afford all flash arrays?

A: Ken: Actually, almost exactly the opposite. Spinning drives are (now, at least) relatively slow. Over the past 10 years the drives have gotten much bigger, although HDD drive speeds haven’t really changed all that much,. Because of this, what I’ve observed is that the IOPS/GB ratio for HDD has, if anything, been getting worse* and the most common bottleneck for an HDD-based customer turns out to be the speed of their drives.

Now consider what happens when a customer moves to SSDs. The SSDs that are sold (and folks can afford) are generally much smaller than the HDDs they are used to, so customers buy as many of them as they can in order to meet their capacity requirements. And the SSDs are, one-for-one, much faster. So what happens? High drive counts + really fast drives = the drives aren’t your bottleneck anymore. Instead, the bottleneck shifts upstream … in a well architected solution, generally to the storage controller or clients.

*For those that know the terms, we could have a long discussion about working set sizes over the years, how fast data ages, tiered storage and such, and the effect that these have on observed iops/GB … but I think we could agree that since HDD speeds aren’t increasing, the iops/GB ratio isn’t generally getting better.

Q: Can I download this slides?

A: Ken: Absolutely. Here are the links to Part 1 of our series:

PPT and PDF: http://www.snia.org/forums/esf/knowledge/webcasts (look for “Storage Performance Benchmarking: Introduction and Fundamentals (July 2015)”)

Presentation Recording: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/164323

Q&A Blog: http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=447

Here are the links to Part 2:

PPT and PDF: http://www.snia.org/forums/esf/knowledge/webcasts (look for “Storage Performance Benchmarking: Part 2 (October 2015)”)

Presentation Recording: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/164335

Q&A Blog: That’s what you’re reading now. :)

Q: Storage controller, is a compute node, right? And for hyper converged systems, storage controller and compute nodes are the same, right?

A: Mark: Most certainly, a Storage Controller can be a compute node, but in our webcast it is not. The term “compute node” is typically interpreted to be a part of the client/hosts layer. A compute node computes for the application, and such application is generating the workload (please see the question above about where workload is initiated).

A good example of the compute node would be a system that renders cartoons, or geodesic fields. As such compute node computes something (application does the work), and stores the results onto the storage controller.

However, in the case of hyper-converged infrastructure, the storage controller is often virtualized among the client hosts, making every compute node a part of a larger storage controller.

Q: Are the performance numbers that vendors publish typically front-end?

A: Mark: I don’t want to generalize published numbers as being one way or another. I recommend reading every publication for specific details. Vendors publish numbers to cover use cases, and each use case may come with its own set of expected measurement points and metrics. Ken and I talked about how metrics matter in the first Storage Performance Benchmarking webcast. :)

Q: “We did an R&D PoC using 32 flash 400GB elements attached on DIMM slots (not through SAS controller, not a direct PCIe attach) and seven 40Gbps cards. We were able to pump 5.5M 4KB-IOPS resulting in 30GB/s (240Gbps) of traffic on the front-end connect. When do you expect the front-end connect be the bottleneck for more standard environment?”

A: Ken: Woot! That sounds like a lot of fun. If you’re in the Raleigh, NC area and can talk about that not under NDA, we should have lunch. I’d like to hear more.

I have a suspicion that this answer won’t satisfy you, because it isn’t going to be as empirical as your example. The problem in answering with raw numbers is that there isn’t a standard configuration for a SUT. An enterprise class storage array with a mix of 40GbE and 32GB FC connections (with traffic over both) will look very different than someone using their old Windows XP box with a single 100Mbit to share out an SMB share, and both will look different than someone accessing their photos on their favorite cloud provider. So, I’ll answer the question by saying that I expect the front-end connect to be the bottleneck anytime the rest of the components in the SUT are capable of hitting your performance metrics (whether that be in terms of response time, IOPS, or data rates), and the front-end connect isn’t.

THAT said, you’d be astounded how often, even today, that MTU mismatches result in terrible front-end performance (and functionality).

Q: “Example of cache in front end connection?”

A: Ken: I’ll cheat and note that SUTs can be a lot more complicated than we showed. For example, our picture looked like this:

 

Benchmarking Image 1

Consider a SUT then where you have:

Benchmarking Image 2

At one level, “the internet” is just a big black box acting as our front-end connect. But if we zoom in on it, perhaps we find that somewhere along the line there’s a caching server. Then we have an easy answer to where you find cache in the front-end connect.

In the much simpler model that you’ll find in many enterprise data environments though, you’ll find that the front-end connect consists of some relatively short length cables and a set of switches – either SAN or NAS switches. And in those environments, you won’t find a lot of cache. You will find memory, but you’ll find it used for buffering more than for caching.

We tried to minimize this in the presentation since there’s not a universally agreed upon distinction between these two terms. I think of a buffer (in this context) primarily as memory set aside to hold data very briefly, after which it is consumed and removed from the buffer. I think of cache, on the other hand, as a storage medium that holds data specifically to speed up data access (storage or retrieval). Data held in a cache can be held for a very long time, and not all data in a cache may ever be consumed/used.

Q: Even SSDs suck at random write but they are good for random read, is there that much difference?

A: Ken: Yes. The data we pulled for drive speeds was real data. And keep in mind that “sucks” is pretty relative here. Enterprise SSDs still tend to be at least 4x faster than spinning media. And, very importantly, their performance is much more consistent and deterministic since seek time is irrelevant with an SSD. New NVRAM technologies, like 3D XPoint, promise to dramatically improve write performance.

DRAM is volatile though so replacing HDDs with that wouldn’t really work, right? But if capacity requirements are high, we cannot replace disks with the cache, right?

A: Mark: Cache should never replace capacity. Cache is temporary storage, and requires by design to move its data to a permanent storage location. The size of cache should be matched to the size of the data that application uses, so called “working area”. For example, if an application writes to a 4GB file (think VMware vmdk), then for best performance the entire 4GB should fit into cache. However, capacity requirements for a VMware datastore can be as high as several TB. If the application (ESX server) is running many VMs, perhaps only the performance few need to fit into cache, while all other VMs would use cache for sub-portions of their vmdks.

A: Ken: You’re right, not permanently. As Mark points out, it isn’t to permanently replace the slower storage with cache necessarily, just supplement it enough that the working set fits in.

Q: How can we make client do less IO? Will it make sense?

A: Mark: A client does less IO by using larger IO size, for example. A classic use case is read- and write-sizes within NFS protocol. It is possible to increase read- and write-size of the NFS protocol from the NFS client mount options side. By default, some Linux environments use 32KB for reads and writes. And reading a 1GB file takes 32768 32KB IOs. If the read size is increased to 1GB, then it takes only 1024 IOs – a 32x reduction!

A: Ken: Other options involve app re-writes (yes, sometimes these ARE possible) and OS upgrades. Perhaps in the “app-rewrite” category, or maybe a new category, I’ve also worked with developers to rewrite their DB queries to be much less disk intensive, for example.

Q: Can you elaborate on some of the client level cache types other than file system or OS?

A: Mark: Other than file system and OS? Hmm… Let’s see: PCI-based cards that cache block-device level cache, e.g. EMC VFCache, SanDisk Fusion-IO, NetApp Flash Cache. Native network protocols (CIFS and NFS) caches. Local database caching, e.g., SafePeak, TimesTen, Windows Azure Caching.

Q: Please add more sessions, which goes into every detail

A: Mark: Absolutely! We will! Promise! We’re shooting for Part 3 in Q1 2016.