PRODUCTPROFILE( ACCELERATINGIO INTENSIVE ...docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_109901/item_702090...Copyright TheTANEJAGroup,Inc.2013.AllRightsReserved.* 1of7* 87ElmStreet,Suite900

Copyright The TANEJA Group, Inc. 2013. All Rights Reserved. 1 of 7 87 Elm Street, Suite 900 Hopkinton, MA 01748 T: 508.435.2556 F: 508.435.2557 www.tanejagroup.com

PRODUCT PROFILE

ACCELERATING IO-‐INTENSIVE VIRTUALIZED APPLICATIONS Shifting Into High Gear with Astute Networks

ViSX G4 Flash-‐based Performance Storage Appliances MAY 2013

Virtualization is a great boon to IT shops for it’s flexible and cost-‐efficient infrastructure that consolidates previously physically sprawling applications and servers. But current hypervisor technologies are still evolving support for high-‐end performance requirements, especially for shared but external-‐to-‐the-‐server resources like storage. Many IT shops trying to convert deeper into their portfolio

based on initial virtualization success have run up against frustrating limits as to which of their more demanding applications can be effectively virtualized and still be delivered with good service. Virtualizing IO intensive applications remains a significant challenge, especially in IT organizations that are building their virtualization environments with traditional storage arrays in order to enable virtual machine migration and provide sufficient data protection.

Most mission critical applications are IO intensive, relying on databases or providing end-‐user communication channels (e.g. email). VDI efforts in particular can become IO performance constrained even at small scales. If virtualized IO constraints with traditional storage are limiting the number of vms per server, or preventing virtual hosting for IO intensive apps like databases, email, and VDI, then flash technologies seem to promise a tailor-‐made high-‐performance solution. But flash can be an expensive investment to acquire and hard to deploy and manage to assure a solid ROI. With flash, performance can be bought, but cost-‐conscious IT organizations must choose wisely or risk implementing expensive and ultimately unsatisfactory or limiting solutions.

An ideal performance solution would drop in to an existing virtual environment, currently constrained or otherwise, and accelerate performance without re-‐architecting the storage layer, without re-‐implementing data protection, and without creating new burdens for the virtual server administrator. It should supercharge the environment to enable greater vm density, deliver better than physical performance for designated apps, and support VDI working at scales that make sense for wholesale adoption. In this product profile we will examine in detail the new Astute Networks ViSX G4 Performance Storage Appliance to see how it fits this ideal profile – deploying without disruption to truly accelerate virtualization performance, increase VM density, and further the adoption of virtualization across IO and mission-‐critical applications.

POOR IO PERFORMANCE STALLS VIRTUALIZATION INITIATIVES The main virtue of virtualization is that it decouples applications from physical infrastructure, enabling both to be managed more independently. This freedom allows IT shops to build architectures that deliver great service in a highly cost-‐efficient manner, and support provisioning new service orders quickly and flexibly. For compute power, virtual hypervisors can pool together scale-‐out clusters of commodity servers and carve them up logically into virtual machines. Then to support virtual machine elasticity and to enable dynamic migration across that compute pool, centralized storage arrays are interconnected to the server cluster. This architecture works well


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enough for consolidating business applications that only make intermittent demands on IO or can tolerate IO latency.

While early phases of virtualization tended to focus on less critical and less IO demanding business applications, they still required scalable capacity and data protection at the same level as when they were physically hosted so it was natural to simply leverage existing array designs and deployments. But now many organizations are attempting to virtualize increasingly IO intensive applications including key databases, email servers, and VDI deployments. These applications, once virtualized and concentrated, severely strain virtualization architectures with contention at the traditional shared storage layer.

The consolidation of applications bAy way of virtualization aggregates IO across virtual machines and delivers an IO load to the storage layer that is almost fully random, defeating many traditional storage performance features. Traditional HDD spindles are best for serial IO, but aggregating lots of them cleverly can provide high performance. However, upgrading SAN’s to high-‐performance arrays delivering enough spindles from traditional capacity storage vendors unacceptably increases total cost and complexity for virtualization projects. Left without a viable solution, this virtualized IO performance bottleneck effectively limits overall vm density and stalls out further virtualization initiatives.

Mixed Results For Flash “Optimizations” Flash technologies are everywhere these days, and at first blush it should be easy to “just add some flash” to an environment for a quick performance boost. But a big problem with many flash “solutions” is simply getting cost-‐effective performance from the flash investment. Assuming that cost is an objective, it’s critical to put the right flash implementation at the right place in the IO path to not only achieve the desired performance but cost-‐efficiently make best use of the flash resources. Flash solutions are not equal in cost, effort or performance payback (see sidebar on Cost Evaluation of Performance solutions).

Where can flash technology be applied to address the virtual IO performance bottleneck? Let’s look at a few of the common options in terms of acceleration of virtual IO, and cost-‐efficiency as an IT investment:

• Flash in the server – Dedicated server flash provides a local IO performance boost, but at a cost that scales with the number of servers. Server flash generally can’t be shared as a pooled resource and it can be difficult to balance workloads to make best use of the flash resources.

Cost Evaluation of Performance Solutions

When comparing performance solutions, it is important to keep an eye on the relevant metrics. Traditional storage arrays often tout price-‐per-‐storage-‐capacity figures (e.g. $/TB) that miss the point when investing in performance. When evaluating IO performance accelerating storage, the better primary comparison metric would be based on price-‐per-‐performance (e.g. $/IOP) or price-‐per-‐“workload” (e.g. $/VDI desktop).

When evaluating solutions with these kinds of price-‐per-‐performance metrics it is also important to consider not just the acquisition cost (CAPEX), but the costs of implementation and operations (OPEX) as well as costs avoided, the potential return on opportunity, and future expansion. For example, while the list acquisition price-‐per-‐performance of the ViSX G4 is designed to be favorable compared to other flash solutions, when the total costs are tallied up the ViSX G4 can far outshine the alternatives in existing virtualization infrastructures.


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The use of server SSD can impede storage vMotion and server fault tolerance features. There are emerging global shared cache solutions but these may require high speed interconnects to support complex cache replication schemes and are still very limited in their ability to scale capacity and performance.

• Flash in the storage array – Flash SSD’s added to traditional storage arrays provide a storage boost over HDD’s, especially if auto-‐tiering is operational. On the other hand tiering implies that not all IO will be treated to equal performance. And storage controllers not designed for flash limit the performance potential of the flash investment. All flash storage can provide a big performance improvement, but can be very expensive unless it optimizes flash usage (e.g. native de-‐dupe, et.al.). And storage networks may have to be upgraded (server HBA, switches, cables, et.al.) to provide enough bandwidth at lower latencies, making the total cost of this option even more expensive.

• Flash in the network – Some solutions host flash as a cache in the storage network, effectively pooling and sharing the cache with the added benefit of a non-‐disruptive implementation. Unfortunately, globally shared cache can’t be reserved or allocated to specific performance demanding applications which results in unpredictable performance, and like with all-‐flash arrays, the network can be an expensive bottleneck limiting flash improvements.

In addition to delivered performance and cost-‐efficiency, other TCO-‐type criteria should be considered like total footprint, power and cooling implications, and the impact on current infrastructure, operations and processes. In particular, integration with and support for hypervisor storage-‐related capabilities is critical. Hypervisor vendors, such as VMware, are increasingly taking over the storage management functions that are typically found in modern storage arrays. Solutions that easily integrate with hypervisors and simplify the daily life of the virtual server admin are increasingly becoming a requirement.

In the above list, networked all-‐flash arrays might come closest to an ideal virtual IO performance solution because it essentially enables sharing a resource pool of flash, and with available hypervisor integrations enabling allocation of those flash resources to specific workloads. But Ethernet based storage networking still constrains high performance IO. What is really needed to boost the most common existing virtual infrastructures is a type of networked flash storage that’s not only architected to internally optimize flash resources but also optimizes TCP/iSCSI traffic to fully deliver on the promise of flash performance over standard Ethernet networks.

An Ideal Solution – Networked Flash The concept of enabling high-‐performance IO for virtual environments by intelligently leveraging networked flash over common Ethernet iSCSI storage networks is exactly what Astute Networks designed into its ViSX product line. Astute’s ViSX solutions are architected to maximize the use and performance capability of flash as shared storage while optimizing both TCP and iSCSI traffic. They call this “Networked Flash™”:

• Provides shared high-‐performance storage with full data protection that enables virtualizing demanding IO intensive applications

• Leverages flash investment with an optimal design for both performance and efficiency • Implements without disruption to server operations, existing capacity storage or virtual

admin management processes

With an Astute Networks VisX solution powered up in the storage network, virtual server administrators treat it as new “tier 0” of storage managed the same as storage from any other existing


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array. Virtual administrators simply migrate IO intensive virtual machines from slower capacity storage onto the new performance flash storage as needed. This has the immediate effect not only of ramping up performance for the re-‐hosted applications, but also reduces contention on the slower storage to the benefit of all virtually hosted applications.

ASTUTE NETWORKS VISX G4 The next generation Astute Networks ViSX G4 is designed from the ground up to handle the 100% sustained random IO workloads generated from demanding high performance virtual environments. Each ViSX G4 is capable of delivering 140,000 IOPS from its 2U array housing up to 45.6TB of usable flash. Significantly, the G4 has built-‐in inline de-‐dupe making that 45.6TB appear effectively as 250TB of total flash, all at full flash speeds.

What really sets the ViSX G4 apart from other network flash storage is its unique DataPump Engine™, a custom ASIC that optimizes network storage traffic over TCP and iSCSI, and internally implements fast flash RAID. Without the DataPump Engine, other networked flash solutions are naturally constrained at the network layer, making their flash both less effective and less cost-‐efficient.

In order to fully address the virtual IO performance problem, the ViSX G4 has been highly optimized for hypervisor environments, integrating closely with VMware vSphere (VMware Ready Certified), Microsoft Hyper-‐V, RedHat, and Citrix XenServer solutions. However, any client with iSCSI can leverage the G4’s high performance storage. For VMware environments, the ViSX G4 is VMware Ready Certified and all vSphere storage services can take advantage of the G4’s high performance storage resources – including iSCSI multi-‐pathing, virtual disk snapshots and virtual disk thin provisioning, storage IO control for performance management, and profile driven storage. The G4 also supports iSCSI boot and is fully manageable through vCenter.

Flash as Flash Can Be Astute Networks aims to solve the virtual IO performance problem at the lowest price-‐per-‐performance (e.g. $/IOP or $/VDI desktop), as compared to traditional capacity storage aiming at the lowest price-‐per-‐capacity (e.g. $/GB). Part of this cost-‐efficiency is in optimizing performance, part in maximizing effective capacity.

As noted above, the ViSX G4 has built-‐in de-‐duplication which on its dual 8-‐core processors with 256GB RAM enables high speed inline de-‐dupe processing. This means that 45.6TB of flash can look like 250TB total flash to clients. This native virtual capacity advantage is in addition to any capacities preserved through thin provisioning or other storage virtualizing technology applied at the hypervisor. If higher capacities are desired, multiple ViSX G4’s can be chained together. VMware vSphere can easily “concatenate” G4 resources at the hypervisor level for increased IOPs and capacities. ViSX is offered with both high endurance eMLC flash or lower cost, lower endurance MLC flash for customers seeking the lowest cost per GB.

Each ViSX G4 serves up to 64 volumes (128 targets) to the virtual environment over Ethernet and iSCSI. The G4 has 2x10GbE and 4x1GbE ports which can all be active or used in any combination. With the leverage of the DataPump Engine, the ViSX G4 delivers the performance equivalent of over 800 15k SAS disks, up to 140,000 sustained random IOPS. With multiple ViSX G4’s clustered together, users can realize well in excess of 1 million random IOPS.

The Optimizing DataPump Engine Astute’s DataPump Engine is a custom ASIC design with 10 multi-‐threaded RISC cores and supporting DMA engines. The DataPump Engine is reported to deliver 5-‐10x the performance of networking on a


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traditional x86 chip. It actually processes a few key tasks that together provide wire speed storage access for iSCSI clients, exposing the full performance capability of flash despite it being delivered over a network (for the virtualization enablement and data sharing benefits).

1. Accelerates network traffic by optimizing the TCP/IP stack 2. Virtualizes the data store messaging by offloading iSCSI, CRC, and SCSI protocol processing 3. Optimizes flash performance by implementing fast flash RAID

It’s clear that iSCSI networked flash without this kind of unique and deliberate network acceleration will suffer latencies and bandwidth constraints that would limit its total effective performance, and increase its relative price-‐per-‐performance. Only by optimizing the network part of the IO chain can the virtual IO performance problem be solved with shared flash storage.

Highly Available, Resilient, and Green The ViSX G4 makes effective use of eMLC flash, and to ensure data integrity over time incorporates an Automated Flash Life-‐cycle Management process. The G4 is actually internally overprovisioned with 28% reserved flash (not counted in the 45.6TB usable) as part of its data protection package. As an example, each of its 24 hot-swappable 400GB eMLC Flash modules actually has 512GB. This extra capacity is used to pre-‐reserve and pre-‐erase cells to speed up garbage collection and overall write performance. It also significantly extends the life of the Flash modules.

For array data protection, the internal controller supports flash RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, and 6. In addition the flash modules in the G4 are hot swappable, as are the redundant power supplies, cooling fans, network and power connections. Astute also offers ViSX Replicator, which supports both synchronous and asynchronous replication for even higher levels of data availability.

And of course, flash storage has an impressively green footprint compared to traditional HDD storage, even more so if you compare the number of spindles that would be required to get flash performance at the de-‐duped flash capacity. Each ViSX G4 unit is spec’d at only 500 watts.

High Performance, Simple Management ViSX arrays are manageable through Astute’s FlashWRX web browser interface, CLI, or SOAP/XML API, but since the ViSX G4 is internally integrated with all flash optimizations and error correcting baked in by default, there is little need for deliberate management attention outside of gross hardware failures. Operating the ViSX itself is mostly a matter of powering up and ensuring network connectivity while data volume and storage related

Figure 1 – FlashWRX Web Management interface showing ViSX RAID configuration


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operations on the G4 for virtual environments would be performed from hypervisor storage management interfaces.

For vSphere administrators, the ViSX G4 comes with a new VMware vCenter plug-‐in to centralize management for storage operations and the ViSX appliance all within vCenter. Like other iSCSI storage arrays, 3rd party storage applications work naturally on the ViSX storage volumes, often with significant performance improvement. For example, network backups can be taken at high speed (and recoveries if ever needed would run much faster too).

SMASHING VIRTUAL IO BARRIERS WITH THE VISX G4 Overall, the ViSX G4 promises to deliver great value leveraging its unique conjunction of virtualization, flash and networked storage:

• Delivering the full unconstrained performance benefits of flash technology • Delivering the data protection benefits of shared storage • Delivering the efficient management benefits of seamless hypervisor integration

The ViSX G4 Flash Performance Storage appliance presents a clear solution to the virtual IO problem. Because it deploys easily into any current virtualization environment, it could support a number of significant virtualization initiatives including:

• Virtualizing IO intensive databases • Accelerating key performance sensitive applications like MS Exchange or Sharepoint • Increasing total vm density and improving server infrastructure utilization • Reducing vMotion churn • Enabling successful VDI deployments at larger scales • Supporting a shorter RPO/faster RTO service level

Is It Really That Simple? Implementing the ViSX G4 is directly simple. Rack the 2U ViSX G4 unit(s), plug them in and configure them to the iSCSI Ethernet network. Declare new storage volumes in the hypervisor and just storage vMotion hot vm datastores over into them from their slower performance constrained locations. The ViSX G4 offers an exceptionally quick upgrade to high performance IO with no disruption of existing infrastructure. It really is true performance acceleration in a matter of minutes.

Is It Actually Cost Effective? When comparing performance solutions, especially with flash, be sure to factor in just how optimally the solution delivers the full promise of flash performance. For example, a flash SSD trapped behind a traditional HDD storage controller accessed over a slow network doesn’t provide the same local performance per TB as server SSD flash. At the same time, server flash isn’t a readily shareable resource in a virtualization environment, limiting its total performance boosting contribution.

The ViSX G4 not only positions flash at the best point for virtualization sharing and enablement – and with the lowest disruption -‐ it also incorporates several features that taken together multiply the returns from your investment in flash. As noted, in-‐line de-‐duplication makes the flash go much farther while the DataPump Engine enables high performance over common networking protocols.

Bottom line is that the ViSX represents a significant opportunity to cost-‐effectively accelerate IO performance in virtual environments, and that enablement brings financial rewards beyond the investment in the ViSX. We believe that for a $50k investment in ViSX, one could expect to readily


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increase vm density to the point of avoiding $100k of server acquisition. A thorough total cost accounting for all the performance benefits should yield multiple ROI factors.

TANEJA GROUP OPINION The virtual IO performance bottleneck presents both a challenge and an opportunity. With the right approach that leverages existing investments in virtual infrastructure and staff expertise, overcoming performance constraints can not only move virtualization initiatives forward, but can accelerate them to provide an ROI well past expectations. Virtualization provides many benefits, and suddenly being able to virtualize much deeper into a formerly virtualization-‐resistant application portfolio can also energize related initiatives such as building private cloud service offerings. Newly high-‐powered environments might even foster ideas for innovative new applications.

Key to the ready adoption of the Astute Networks ViSX G4 approach is that it will drop in to whatever virtual environment infrastructure that exists today. Delivering non-‐disruptive high-‐performance flash solutions avoids causing forklift upgrades, ripping and replacing, or otherwise re-‐architecting productive environments. Astute has deliberately aimed at networked flash as the best way to leverage flash technology because it puts in the right place to be most effectively shared while preserving current data protection and storage management practices. With a focus on tight hypervisor integration, the ViSX G4 solves the virtual IO performance constraint with almost no impact on the virtual administrator.

Because of features like inline de-‐dupe and the custom DataPump Engine, other performance flash solutions will be hard pressed to match the IOPS/$ of the ViSX G4. For currently constrained environments the combination of high performance with cost-‐efficiency and easy adoption should be immediately attractive. When benefits like increasing total vm density, performance improvements for all vms (by removing contention for shared traditional storage), and new service opportunities are factored in, the ViSX G4 should have an obvious ROI justification. Ultimately, the simple fact that the ViSX G4 can help virtual admins deliver a “better than physical” experience to important applications is probably reason enough.

.NOTICE: The information and product recommendations made by Taneja Group are based upon public information and sources and may also include personal opinions both of Taneja Group and others, all of which we believe to be accurate and reliable. However, as market conditions change and not within our control, the information and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. Taneja Group, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any damages whatsoever (including incidental, consequential or otherwise), caused by your use of, or reliance upon, the information and recommendations presented herein, nor for any inadvertent errors that may appear in this document.

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PRODUCTPROFILE( ACCELERATING*IO INTENSIVE ...docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_109901/item_702090...Copyright *The*TANEJA*Group,*Inc.*2013.All*Rights*Reserved.* 1*of*7* 87Elm*Street,*Suite900

PRODUCTPROFILE( ACCELERATINGIO INTENSIVE ...docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_109901/item_702090...Copyright TheTANEJAGroup,Inc.2013.AllRightsReserved.* 1of7* 87ElmStreet,Suite900