The Role of SSDs in the Data Centre

Rob Anderson, Director of Technology & Business DevelopmentIsilon Systems EMEArob@isilon.com

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Massive Growth in the Data CentreIsilon customer: EBI/EMBLOver 6 PB for genomics, including 1000 Genomes & Elixir

Isilon customer: AdobeScene7 cloud storage & media publishing platform

Isilon customer: SoftLayerTens of thousands of hosted virtual servers

Isilon customer: NavTeqTraffic, mapping and location data for the globe

How is the industry responding?

3 & 4 TB drives to deal with explosion of dataVolume sizes on traditional storage are not increasing, remain < 10 TBDesire to migrate data to clouds (private or public) where possible, to reduce costsUptake of scale-out storage systems to tackle complexity of ever-growing repositories and to create private clouds

Effect on enterprise storage?

Disks are bigger, but not fasterIndividual controller throughput is also not keeping pace with disk sizeHardware RAID is not keeping up with disk sizes, so repairs are longer and risk higherThe number of things to manage—LUNs, volumes, aggregates, etc is getting ever larger, so things are getting more complex

SSD

Isilon

SSD’s – Hype or Reality

SSD – Disruptive Technology

Industry insiders and vendor executives were asked to rank the most disruptive technology or business model changes to affect the Storage Industry over the next 3-5 years:

1. Flash memory / Solid State Disk2. Private and Public Cloud Computing 3. Storage and Server Virtualization4. Storage Efficiency (thin provisioning, de-duplication,

compression etc)5. Unified Networking

Source: GigaOM Pro, May 2009

SSD Key Findings

SSS memory densities are 64x what they were 3 years ago. $/GB is decreasing rapidly but still nowhere near rotating disk $/GB. SSS has much faster access time.

SSD market is gaining momentum. Drive shipments are low right now as a % of the total, but future is extremely bright.

SSD’s (combined with SATA) are making Enterprise SATA disk drives more viable as primary storage. Customers can use half as many drives and achieve similar level of performance as FC/SAS drives which are currently typical for PS environments.

Correctly configured SSD technology can unleash the full potential of multi-core processors, increasing enterprise data throughput while decreasing power and space requirements.

I/O Intensive WW Storage Systems Forecast

I/O intensive Storage Systems are based on Solid State Drives (Tier 0)

Source: IDC 2009

~37PB of SSD based systems estimated to ship in 2010Systems Revenue increasing 98% CAGR between 2008-2013 Price/GB declining by 48% from ‘08-’13

Current methods of SS Storage Adoption Use of SSD’s as simple disk replacement

Pros – Easy, Few changes required to system Least disruptive method of adding SSD’s to a storage environment

Cons – Performance limitations of storage controllers Tiered migration is poor (wasteful since not all data on SSD volume is hot) Deploying all SSD for a volume is expensive

Use of NAND flash as cache in storage controllers or “front-ending disk drives with NAND flash”Pros –

More adapted approach, more cost effective for amount of acceleration deliveredCons –

Performance bottleneck moved to the storage controller head, which may not scale

Isilon Overview

Proven, global leader in Scale Out Storage solutions

Unrivaled product innovation – 6th Generation

1,400 customers and growing rapidly

World-class products and global services

Strong ecosystem of technology partners

NASDAQ Ticker: ISLN

Isilon in Gartner’s NAS “Leaders” Quadrant• Isilon joins NetApp, EMC and

IBM in the upper right of Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for NAS, 2010”

• “Leaders” scored the highest in ability to execute and completeness of vision

• The other three vendors in the Leaders Quadrant are multi-billion dollar businesses and Isilon gained ground on each in 2009

• Key strength: “Isilon’s three primary product lines have significantly broadened its appeal in horizontal market.”

• Key strength: “The ease of implementing, managing and growing Isilon scale-out NAS results in high business efficiency.”

Isilon Customers

13

Isilon’s Scale-out Storage Solution

Nodes of different types

Expandable to 144 nodes

Up to 10 PB in a single file system

Up to 1,152 CPU cores

Up to 2.3 TB memory

Up to 576 GbE ports

Enterprise-class

hardwareComplete

storage system

Isilon IQOneFS™

intelligentsoftware

Scalable, and simple

ONEFS

one namespace, no LUNs/Volumes

FT

P/H

TT

PC

loud AP

I

NO MIGRATIONS, NO RECONFIGURATIONS

CIF

S

iSC

SINFS

Complex: Separate LUNs and volumes make for a complex

solution

Eliminate ComplexityOneFS—virtualise / cluster all nodes

No waste: Space is ‘liquid’ on OneFS, so all space

except parity is available

No LUNs or volumes: All space is virtualised. OneFS keeps track off all blocks, obviating the need for a

volume manager

Inefficient: Space wasted in fixed-size LUNs; disk has to be hard-allocated to LUNs

How clustering improves performanceOneFS—virtualise / cluster all nodes

Bottlenecks: Controller becomes bottleneck to

storage

No bottlenecks: Parallel datapaths eliminate

bottlenecks & hotspots

Isilon’s Approach to SSD Adoption

Place file-system metadata directly on the SSDFaster Namespace operations

Design and Simulation BVT workflowsmakefiles, dependency checking, design synchronization, IP and library access etc.

Speeds up treewalks immenselyHome directories workflows (config files, my_docs)Significantly lower latencySAS level performance for hybrid SATA+SSD hybrid node

What is metadata?

Every file systems stores user data and metadata—the objects used to locate dataExamples

InodesDirectory blocksInode metablocks (extents)

Speeding up metadata speeds up access to files and data within files

3 Products Announced in 2010Product

Options

IQ 10000X-SSD IQ 32000X-SSD IQ 5000S-SSD

SSDYes

STEC SLC (2x 100GB)

Yes STEC SLC (4x100GB)

Yes STEC SLC (1x100GB)

HDD10 x 1TB 7200rpm SATA 32 x 1TB 7200rpm SATA

11 x 450GB 15000rpm SAS

Capacity 10TB 32TB 5TB

Memory/CPUDual Quad-Core CPU

16GB MemoryDual Quad-Core CPU

16GB MemoryDual Quad-Core

CPU 16GB Memory

Minimum Cluster size

3 nodes i.e 30TB Raw 3 nodes i.e 96TB Raw3 nodes i.e 15TB

Raw

CREATE & CAPTURE PROCESS

ARCHIVE ARCHIVE

Isilon IQ SAS(16-518 TB)

S-SeriesTransactional I/O &

Random Access

Isilon IQ 5400S,

IQ 5000S-SSD

Isilon IQ X Series Nodes

6000/12000

X-SeriesHigh Concurrent /

Sequential Throughput

Isilon IQ EX Nodes

6000/12000

Isilon IQ X Series SATA (6TB – 3,456TB)

Isilon IQ 10000X-SSD 36000X, 72000X, IQ

32000X-SSD

NL-SeriesNearline Storage

Isilon IQ Nearline SATA(250TB – 3,456TB)

Isilon IQ 72NL,36NL

Backup Acceleratorto Tape Storage

High PerformanceBackup/Restore

10GE

SSD

SSD10GE

10GE

Performance BenchmarksExample 1: IQ 12000X versus IQ 10000X-SSDConfiguration and Workflow: Home Directory Access Pattern

4% Write, 61% Read, 35% Metadata Small Files, Small Block Reads 5 Node Cluster, 30 Linux Clients

5000 5200 5400 5600 5800 6000 62000.0

5.0

10.0

15.0

20.0

25.0

30.0

35.0

40.0

IQ 12000X

8000 10000 12000 14000 16000 18000 20000 22000 24000 26000 280000.0

1.0

2.0

3.0

4.0

5.0

6.0

7.0

8.0

9.0

IQ 10000X-SSD

Lat

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Ops/Sec Ops/Sec

IQ10000X-SSD delivers up to 4x increase in IOPS and ~ 8x improvement in latency

Performance BenchmarksExample 2: IQ 12000X versus IQ 10000X-SSD

Configuration and Workflow: Simulated SpecSFS 2008

5 Node Cluster, 30 Linux Clients

7500 8000 8500 9000 9500 10000 10500 11000 115000.0

5.0

10.0

15.0

20.0

25.0

IQ 12000X

9000 100001100012000130001400015000160001700018000190000.0

1.0

2.0

3.0

4.0

5.0

6.0

7.0

8.0

IQ 10000X-SSD

Lat

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Ops/Sec Ops/Sec

IQ 10000X-SSD delivers ~17.5K IOPS under 2ms of latency

Performance Solution for

With SSD, SyncIQ tree-walk performance improved from 45 hours to 6 hours

Company: ARM - Fabless Semiconductor Vertical: Design & Simulation Why Isilon: Deep-submicron design was stretching existing NAS storage beyond its limits. Needed a truly scalable solution like IsilonConfiguration: Storage required for each of 3 locations (UK, USA, India) Requirement: Need faster replication to met their RPO. Billions of tiny files.

Financial Quantitative Analysis

Customer Background: Hedge fund. Develops automated trading algorithms using advanced mathematical and statistical modeling techniques and an extremely high-performance computing environment

Workflow Requirements: ~40% of their total accesses were NFS Namespace Operations (getattrs, access checks, file directory creates etc) Extremely low latency requirements (interactive with user) Lots of files with random access patterns (scripts, test results, logs etc)

Isilon Solution: 49 node IQ10000X-SSD cluster in production now

More RAM, More CPU, Integrated 10GE and SSD for metadata

Thank You

Rob Anderson, Director of Technology & Business DevelopmentIsilon Systems EMEArob@isilon.com