stec Host Cache Solution

Transcription

1 White Paper stec Host Cache Solution EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software and the stec s1120 PCIe Accelerator speed decision support system (DSS) workloads and free up disk I/O resources for other applications.

2 Contents Introduction DSS Performance Challenges stec Solution Test Methodology and Configuration Results Conclusion

3 Decision support systems (DSS) are tools for gathering and analyzing organizational information to discern trends, make forecasts and aid decision making. DSS queries tend to be complex operations that involve large data sets and can take many hours to complete. Queries can saturate disk I/O resources and negatively affect the performance of other applications that share the IT infrastructure. 03

4 1 Introduction stec s EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software with stec s1120 PCIe Accelerators is a powerful, cost-effective and easy-to-implement solution for resolving storage-related I/O bottlenecks in DSS workloads. This solution establishes an SSD host cache for read workloads that significantly reduces the processing time for DSS queries. To demonstrate its performance advantage, stec ran a benchmark test of an Oracle database warehouse, comparing the stec solution with a traditional disk drive-only configuration. The results showed that the stec solution delivered 70% better performance, as highlighted by two measurements: a reduction in the completion time from 8.3 hours to 2.6 hours for all queries, and an increase in disk read performance from 76,578 blocks/sec to 252,560 blocks/sec. The benefits of the stec EnhanceIO and s1120 PCIe Accelerator solution for DSS workloads include: Faster query processing time Enhanced user productivity Eliminated or minimized performance impact on other applications sharing the IT infrastructure, avoiding costly hardware upgrades Offloading read workloads from storage arrays to extend the life of the storage infrastructure Deployment in minutes with no changes to the application or IT environment Small incremental cost for substantial performance gain Maintenance of all existing backup and data protection policies 2 DSS Performance Challenges A major benefit of enterprise applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) is being able to leverage the information they contain to make smarter decisions. Decision support systems are the tools that perform this function. They gather and analyze organizational information to discern trends, make forecasts and aid decision making. DSS is highly valuable for improving the efficiency and productivity of an organization. DSS queries are not simple transactions. They tend to be complex operations that involve large data sets and can take many hours to complete. DSS queries can saturate disk I/O resources and negatively affect the performance of other applications that share enterprise-class storage or the resources on a virtualized server. As a result, slower enterprise applications cause staff or customer dissatisfaction, reduced productivity and potentially lost sales. 04

5 To meet the increasing performance demands of DSS, organizations may: Add disk drives to the storage system and stripe data across more disks to improve throughput. However, this is expensive, and leads to low-capacity utilization and higher use of power, cooling and rack space. Move the DSS workload to a separate storage system and/or server. But dedicating infrastructure to DSS adds IT expense and management overhead and contributes to server and storage sprawl. A superior alternative for achieving high disk I/O for DSS is enterpriseclass solid-state drives (SSDs) with flash memory. SSDs deliver performance orders of magnitude higher than disk drives and cost less on a per-iops basis. Capacity pricing for SSDs continues to fall faster than other media. Enterprise SSDs offer high reliability, high performance, energy efficiency, ease of implementation and long device lifetime. Flash manufacturers allow Partial Page Programming with Single- Level Cell NAND (described in detail in the subsequent section) so that the controller may program one or more bits over several write operations. Flash manufacturers discourage writing to a page more than four times before erasing the block containing that page. The spare area is typically written together with the sector data, to minimize the number of Partial Page Programming events. 3 stec Solution: EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software and s1120 PCIe Accelerator stec recommends a powerful, cost-effective and easy-to-implement solution for resolving storage-related I/O bottlenecks in DSS workloads: stec EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software with s1120 PCIe Accelerators. This combined solution significantly reduces the processing time for DSS queries, and reduces or even eliminates the negative performance impact on other applications. stec EnhanceIO is hardware-independent caching software that accelerates I/O blocks cached in any SSD storage device. The software establishes a secondary cache on SSD for blocks moved out of memory. It improves throughput by serving reads from SSD cache instead of disk, while writes go through to disk to ensure that data is persistent and the integrity of transactions is maintained. 05

6 EnhanceIO runs below the application layer, supports Windows and Linux, and seamlessly integrates into a broad range of IT environments. With a simple installation process, EnhanceIO minimizes disruption to server and storage operations. EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software consists of three main components: Data Mover, which manages data in and out of the cache Policy Engine, which enforces the cache s replacement policies Metadata Management system, which manages the metadata in the DRAM and maps individual cache blocks to the blocks of the volume being cached EnhanceIO s modular cache mode engine allows stec to add application-specific caching or advanced cache placement policies in the future. Cache mode (Read-Only, Write-Through, or Write-Back) and cache replacement policy (FIFO, LRU and Random) can be changed by using either the CLI or GUI. stec s1120 PCIe Accelerators are enterprise-class SSDs that deliver exceptional performance, low latency, low-power consumption and high durability for hosting business-critical data and mission-critical applications. Benefits of the stec EnhanceIO and s1120 PCIe Accelerator solution include: Significantly faster DSS query processing time Deployment in minutes with no changes to the application Maintenance of all existing backup, data protection and high availability policies Small incremental cost (approximately $12,000 list price for complete solution) Extensive read workload offloads from storage arrays Extended life of existing storage infrastructure In addition, stec s superior PCIe-based solid-state architecture is purpose-built to reduce data access latencies and speed up application performance. Long latencies and high CPU and host DRAM utilization make competitive PCIe-based solid-state devices unsuitable for data center deployments. By connecting server CPUs directly to the flash storage using the most efficient, reliable and scalable architecture, stec PCIe SSDs provide low-latency data access for host applications while eliminating the tax on host CPU and DRAM, accelerating application performance to high levels. 06

7 stec s PCIe SSDs come with built-in enterprise-class reliability that makes this solution suitable for storing business-critical data. stec PCIe SSDs offer built-in protection against flash media failures so all data is protected against flash page, block, die or chip-level failures. This ensures that stec PCIe SSDs can be used for primary storage not just for caching applications. PowerSafe Technology ensures that data on board PCIe SSDs is protected against unscheduled power outages. Using patent pending CellCare Technology, stec delivers unprecedented endurance while using multi-level cell (MLC) media enabling the use of less-expensive MLC-based stec PCIe SSDs even in write-intensive caching and database applications. Finally, stec PCIe SSDs are backed by a five (5) year warranty to assure their robustness in business-critical enterprise applications. 4 Test Methodology and Configuration NAND suffers from reliability, endurance and data retention problems that require complex management solutions. The following intrinsic limitations make a design with NAND flash challenging: To demonstrate the performance advantage of the stec EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software and s1120 PCIe Accelerator for DSS workloads, stec benchmarked the performance of an Oracle database warehouse with and without the stec solution according to the following parameters: Ensure that there is a disk I/O bottleneck. A single shelf of disk drives was saturated in order to show the impact of disk I/O bottleneck. Ensure that there is no CPU or memory bottleneck. The benchmark was run on a single database instance on a server with a fast CPU and ample memory. Ensure test objectivity by using a third-party open source load generation tool with default settings. In this case, Hammerora was used. A variety of performance statistics from Hammerora, the Linux sysstat utility and Quest Software s Spotlight on Oracle diagnostics tool were collected and compared. Hardware 2 x Intel 3.47GHz 12 cores 96GB memory stec s1120 PCIe Accelerator NetApp FAS 3240 storage system, 1 x DS4243 disk shelf, 24x 300GB 15K SAS HDDs Operating System Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.2 Kernel Linux el6uek.x86_64 07

8 Database Oracle 11gR2 Enterprise Edition sga_max_size 38G Software stec EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software for Linux Hammerora 2.11, the open source load test tool Quest Software Benchmark Factory TPC-H software benchmark settings Test Methodology Two test methodologies were applied: (1) Baseline without stec Solution: 1. Created multiple tablespaces to have a database size o approximately 1.5TB 2. Used Hammerora to populate a tablespace for TPC-H benchmark with 150 users with scale factor of 300. Resulted in a 408GB dataset in 500GB tablespace on a 2TB LUN on storage array 3. Placed temp tables, log and control files on separate NetApp LUNs 4. Generated TPC-H workload with 176 queries by 8 users 5. Measured completion time for all 8 query sets (2) stec Solution: 1. Installed stec s1120 PCIe Accelerator in server 2. Installed EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software 3. Established cache relationship for TPC-H LUN on stec s1120 PCIe SSD 4. Placed temp tables, log and control files on separate NetApp LUNs 5. Generated TPC-H workload with 176 queries by 8 users 6. Measured completion time for all 8 query sets Comparison Baseline: HDDs Only stec Solution: EnhanceIO + s1120 PCIe Accelerator Improvement Factor Completion time for all query sets (hours) % Average disk I/O utilization 99.2% 28.7% 71% Database reads in blocks/sec 76, ,560 70% CPU utilization 10% 53% 81% 08

9 5 Results The stec solution delivered about 70% better performance than the baseline HDD-only configuration (see Table 1): The completion time for all queries fell from 8.3 hours to 2.6 hours (see Figure 1). This means that users get their query results faster and productivity is improved. Average disk I/O utilization fell from 99.2% to 28.7% (see Figure 2). Disk I/O was clearly a performance bottleneck for the baseline configuration, and the stec solution eliminated it. In environments where multiple applications share a virtualized server or enterprise storage array, the stec solution frees up disk I/O resources so that other applications are not adversely affected when DSS queries run. Database disk reads increased from 76,578 blocks/sec to 252,560 blocks/sec and CPU utilization increased from 10% to 53%. The SSD cache enabled Oracle to work and access data much faster. It also allowed CPU resources to be utilized more highly, accelerating the application and increasing the return on investment in server hardware. 09

10 6 Conclusion stec offers a fast, cost-effective and easy-to-implement hostbased SSD cache solution to help your organization accelerate DSS performance to reduce query time, improve user productivity and avoid slowing down other applications sharing the IT infrastructure. The combination of stec EnhanceIO SSD Cache Software and s1120 PCIe Accelerators delivers numerous benefits: Faster query processing time 70% faster than HDDs only, according to this benchmark test Enhanced user productivity Faster queries allow users to do more DSS work and make smarter decisions faster Increased server utilization by eliminating disk I/O performance bottleneck Better return on investment in server hardware Minimized performance impact on other enterprise applications Maintain user satisfaction and productivity while avoiding costly upgrades to the IT infrastructure Extended life of the storage infrastructure by offloading read workloads to the host cache No changes to the application Software runs on Window and Linux servers beneath the application layer No changes to backup and data protection policies All persistent data is written to the storage system, while the SSD host cache serves read I/O Use of inexpensive capacity drives in storage system instead of performance drives Moving read workload to SSD host cache reduces performance requirements for the external storage system (see Figure 3) Figure 3: SSD Host Cache Enables Use of Capacity Drives in Storage System 10

11 About stec stec, Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise-class, solid-state storage solutions designed for the ever-growing performance, reliability and endurance requirements of today s advanced data centers. The industry s first company to deploy solidstate drives (SSDs) into large-scale enterprise environments, stec offers the industry s widest range of solid-state storage solutions, which protect critical information for major business and government organizations worldwide. Headquartered in Santa Ana, California, stec also serves the embedded and military/aerospace markets with SSDs for industrial and rugged environments. Enabling Tomorrow s Applications For more information on stec products, solutions and technology, please visit facebook.com/userstecinc twitter.com/stec_inc youtube.com/user/stecincssd 3001 Daimler Street, Santa Ana, CA stec, Inc. The stec name, logo, design, ZeusRAM, CellCare, Secure Array of Flash Elements, PowerSafe and EnhanceIO are trademarks of stec, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 1303_80_V01_US