I received several questions about the performance of the Oracle/Sun F20 flash card I used in my previous post about block alignment, so I put together a quick overview of the card’s performance capabilities. The following results are from testing the card in a dual socket 2.93Ghz Nehalem (x5570) system running Solaris x64. This is similar to the server platform Oracle uses in the ExaData 2 platform.

The F20 card is a SAS controller with 4 x 24GB flash modules attached to it. You can find more info on the flash modules on Adam Leventhal’s blog and the official Oracle product page has the F20 details.

All of my tests used 100% random 4KB blocks. I focused on random operations, because in most cases it is not cost effective to use SSD for sequential operations. These tests were run with a variety of different thread counts to give an idea of how the card scales with multiple threads. The first test compared the performance of a single 24GB flash module to the performance of all 4 modules. Read more…

Block alignment is an important topic that is often overlooked in storage. I read a blog entry by Robin Harris a couple months back about the importance of block alignment with the new 4KB  drives. I was curious to test the theory on one of the new 4KB drives, but I did not have one on hand. That got me thinking about Solid State Disk (SSD) devices. If filesystem misalignment hurts traditional spinning disk performance, how would it impact SSD performance. In short, it is ugly.

Here is a chart showing the difference between aligned and misaligned random read operations to a Sun F20 card. I guess it is officially an Oracle F20 card. Read more…

I spoke at TechForum in New York earlier this week. Here is a copy of my presentation for anyone who is interested. The official title is “Rethinking Storage Strategies: How Virtualization is Transforming Storage.” At a high level, I spoke about the current trends in storage and how they play together with server virtualization. I do not think it will have the same impact without the running commentary, so feel free to comment here or drop me a line if you have any questions.

  Storage Trends and Server Virtualization (199.0 KiB)

In a previous post I discussed the topic of deduplication for capacity optimization. Removing redundant data blocks on disk is the first, and most obvious, phase of deduplication in the marketplace. It helps to drive down the most obvious cost – the cost per GB of disk capacity. This market has grown quickly over the last few years. Both startups and established storage vendors have products that compete in the space. They are most commonly marketed as virtual tape library (VTL) or disk-to-disk backup solutions.

Does that mean that deduplication is a point solution for highly sequential workloads? No. There is another somewhat less obvious benefit of deduplication.

What storage administrator does not ask for more cache in the storage array? If I can afford 8GB, I want 16GB. If the system supports 16GB, I want 32GB. Whether it is for financial or technical reasons, cache is always limited. What about deduplicating the data in cache? When the workload is streaming sequential backup data from disk, this may not be very helpful. However, in a primary storage system with a more varied workload, this becomes very interesting.

Read more…