Got Isilon? Need IOPS? Get Avere. Scalable I/O Performance to Complement Any EMC Isilon Environment By: Jeff Tabor, Director of Product Marketing
Achieving Performance Scaling Overcoming Random I/O and Write Performance If you re facing a big data challenge, chances are you ve looked at EMC s Isilon product line for a solution. With clustered file system technology that enables scaling a single NAS system to 20PB, EMC Isilon offers a compelling solution for capacity scaling. The Achilles heel of the EMC Isilon solution, however, is random I/O and write performance. Many big data applications in media & entertainment, oil & gas, life sciences, Internet, and other industries are bringing EMC Isilon systems to their knees with these workloads. More and more EMC Isilon customers are turning to Avere to provide a performance scaling solution to complement their existing EMC Isilon deployment. Avere provides a scale-out, Flash-powered NAS solutions that adds scalable, random I/O and write performance to any EMC Isilon environment. Motion picture rendering and transcoding, seismic processing and interpretation, genomic sequencing, network log analysis, thumbnail processing, VDI, and virtual servers are all examples of applications that can benefit from Avere. 1
How did this happen? EMC Isilon Customers Random I/O and Write Performance Suffers Isilon s initial focus as a company was to offer a simple, scalable storage solution for streaming I/O of Internet content like pictures, videos, songs, etc. Technically, their goal was to provide a solution for scaling capacity, spreading all files across all the available storage, and delivering great read access to large files. As a result, EMC Isilon s random I/O performance, to small files or to random data blocks within a large file, is not great. When a client reads data from an Isilon system, it connects to a single node within the EMC Isilon cluster. For large sequential reads of, say, video files, the EMC Isilon cluster does a nice job of pre-fetching all the data blocks that compose the file from all the different nodes in the cluster. For large sequential read access, the EMC Isilon system can easily predict which block is next since all the blocks are read in sequential order. For random I/O, however, Isilon is unable to predict which data block will be accessed next. Therefore, the accesses are typically slowed down by the latency of the cluster interconnect network and the latency of the spinning disks. EMC Isilon s write performance is not so great either. EMC Isilon protects all files written to their system by writing the data blocks that make up the files across many nodes in the cluster and making as many as four duplicate copies of each data block for redundancy. This is a great way to guarantee availability of the content but has substantial negative impact on write performance. Additional negative impact to performance comes from data protection jobs running on the EMC Isilon cluster. Backup, mirroring, failed disk recovery, and other data protection functions running on the EMC Isilon cluster use the same CPU and memory resources as the client-facing performance. So, if you are using the 2
EMC Isilon cluster both as primary storage and as a source for, say, backup, performance for your primary applications will suffer. How Does Avere Help? Separating Performance from Capacity Avere separates performance scaling from capacity scaling and more efficiently delivers both. In what we call the Edge-Core architecture, Avere provides an FXT Series Edge filer that is optimized for performance scaling and enables the EMC Isilon cluster to focus on what it does best, capacity scaling, as the Core filer. Avere takes ownership of active files from the EMC Isilon Core filer and stores the file data and metadata on fast RAM/NVRAM, Flash, and SAS media contained within the FXT Edge filer. Linear performance scaling is provided via clustering, with up to 50 FXT nodes supported per cluster. A large FXT cluster can provide as much as 600 CPU cores, 7.2TB of RAM, and 150TB of Flash all operating as a single ultra-fast pool of storage. FXT Edge filers are positioned in the network to be near the storage clients to provide the lowest possible latency. Avere FXT Edge filers employ many different techniques to accelerate performance. As FXT nodes are added to the cluster, performance scales linearly to millions of ops/sec and over 100 GB/sec. The FXT cluster takes ownership of the files and accelerates the performance of read, write, and metadata operations. Active files are tiered to the Edge filer from the Core filer at the sub-file block level to efficiently use the fast media of the Edge filer. On demand, data blocks are automatically replicated on multiple FXT nodes to provide parallel access to the hottest data blocks. Large files are striped at the block level across multiple FXT nodes in the cluster to provide parallel access to the large files. Write-performance acceleration is provided with high capacity NVRAM and N+1 mirroring. Metadata is accelerated with 3
a variety of techniques including directory caching and readahead. With an Avere Edge filer in place and accelerating performance to the storage clients, the performance workload is offloaded from the EMC Isilon Core filer. Using the SPECsfs2008 workload as the benchmark, the Avere Edge filer provides absolute offload. That is, from the dataset creation phase through the benchmark run completion, no synchronous requests are issued against the Core filer. This offload enables the EMC Isilon Core filer to focus on data protection functions like backup and mirroring, reducing backup and mirror windows dramatically. The offload also enables EMC Isilon Core filers to be dramatically cost reduced, enabling the more cost-effective and dense EMC Isilon NL-Series to be used instead of the EMC Isilon S- or X-Series. In addition, Avere FXT Edge filers provide far more that just performance acceleration. Global namespace and transparent data movement enable joining multiple EMC Isilon clusters and multiple heterogeneous NAS systems from other vendors (e.g. NetApp, BlueArc, Oracle ZFS) into a single namespace and non-disruptively keeping the storage capacity evenly balanced. The user interface of the FXT Edge filer provides powerful monitoring and statistics that enable deep insight into the operations of the entire NAS environment. WAN file-services enables separating Edge filers from Core filers over a WAN and delivering the Avere benefits at remote locations while maintaining the simplicity of a consolidated and centrally located Core filer. What s the Bottom Line? Six Times Faster Than EMC Isilon Alone Avere s technology for delivering performance is so powerful that when compared to EMC Isilon running on similar hardware, Avere is more than six times faster than EMC Isilon. Running an 4
industry-standard NFS benchmark (SPECsfs2008 1 ), the Avere FXT 3800 delivers nearly 50,000 ops/sec per node while the EMC Isilon S200 delivers less than 8,000 ops/sec per node. Let s dig into the SPEC SFS results a little deeper. The Avere results 2 the EMC Isilon results 3 can be found on the SPEC SFS website, and a visual comparison is included below. Comparing the systems under test (i.e. 32-node Avere FXT 3800 cluster vs. 140-node EMC Isilon S200 cluster), Avere delivered 43% higher performance and 51% lower latency in a package that cost 79% less, used 84% fewer disks, and consumed 74% less space, power, and cooling. SPEC SFS Results Avere EMC Isilon Avere Advantage Throughput (IOPS) 1,592,334 1,112,705 ORT, Latency (msec) 1.24 2.54 List Price ($/IOPS) $2.3 $10.7 43% higher 51% lower 79% less Data Disks (qty) 549 3360 84% fewer Rack Units (RU) 76 288 74% less 42U Cabinets (qty) 1.8 7 Avere FXT 3800 32-node Isilon S200 140-node Product Configuration cluster cluster 74% less 1 http://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html#nfs 2 http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/res2013q2/sfs2008-20130318-00218.html 3 http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/res2011q2/sfs2008-20110527-00186.html 5
If you are a current EMC Isilon customer and need to add performance, take a look at Avere. We have a full line of FXT Edge filers to meet the needs of any EMC Isilon customer. And, if you are an EMC Isilon fan and have a new project, I d suggest looking at an Avere FXT Edge filer teamed-up with the EMC Isilon NL- Series as the Core filer. Many Avere customers are finding this combination to provide best-in-class performance scaling and best-in-class capacity scaling. About Avere Systems Avere Systems brings to the market NAS Optimization solutions designed specifically to scale performance and capacity separately and take advantage of new storage media using real-time tiering. Avere's FXT Series Edge filers allow organizations to achieve unlimited application performance scaling, free applications from the confines of the data center by eliminating latency and cut storage costs by more than half. Learn more at http://www.averesystems.com, and you can follow the company on Twitter @AvereSystems. 2013, Avere Systems. All Rights Reserved. 6