EMC VNX and EMC Isilon MTP Certification Performance Report 5-16-2014
Table of Contents Abstract... 3 Certified Products... 3 Test Process... 3 Topology... 3 Key Findings... 5 About EMC Isilon & VNX: EMC Isilon is scale-out NAS storage designed to efficiently store and automatically manage large capacity and throughput repositories. EMC Isilon reduces the cost, complexity, and time it takes to effectively store, retain, protect, manage, access and extract value from expanding archives increasing your return on information, infrastructure, and individuals. Ideal for both traditional and the new generation of private and hybrid cloud archive applications from content depots and enterprise user sync/share repositories to general archives, compliance archives, and backup repositories. EMC VNX is a unified system, convergence of block and file storage designed to perform management operations. It is designed for a wide range of environments that include mid-tier through enterprise. EMC VNX Block functionality supports FC and iscsi protocols which are best suited for Milestone LiveDB and can be implemented even for ArchiveDB. About Milestone Systems: Milestone Systems is the world s leading provider of open platform IP video surveillance software. Milestone has provided easy-to-use, powerful video management software in more than 100,000 installations worldwide. Milestone XProtect products are designed with open architecture and are compatible with more IP cameras, encoders and digital video recorders than any other manufacturer. Because Milestone provides an open platform, you can integrate today s best business solutions and expand what s possible with future innovations. Visit www.milestonesys.com for more. 2 EMC - MTP Certification Summary
Abstract This report highlights the performance results of certification tests performed on the EMC VNX storage array and the EMC Isilon platform acting respectively as live video database and long term archive storage locations for a Milestone XProtect video management software (VMS) surveillance system. These EMC product lines represent the leading edge components used in Video Surveillance for external storage. Certification of the EMC VNX and EMC Isilon storage systems will ensure that any surveillance system built using the EMC and Milestone XProtect components will be able to record and archive an amount of video consistent with the recommendations of the Milestone Server and Storage Calculator. Certified Products EMC Isilon NL400 cluster (OneFS 7.1.0) EMC VNX5300 storage array with FC and iscsi interface EMC VNX7500 storage array with FC interfaces Milestone XProtect Corporate 2013 R2 Test Process The first step in the test was to establish a benchmark performance level against which to measure the performance of the system under more data-intensive levels of video recording. Once the benchmark was established, the test process calls for increasing the parameters of the video streams to add more data to each stream and each recording server. Tests were completed starting from 1 Recording server to 5. The use of 3 Megapixel resolutions with 8fps was used throughout, with each server supporting 32 cameras per recording server for a total of 160 high resolution cameras. H.264 was chosen as the only codec with which all tests would be performed due to the overwhelming utilization of this codec in new IP video surveillance installations. The performance of the system was monitored as these parameters are increased until the system reached an unacceptable level of write latency, CPU consumption, or video frame loss. At that point the data load was reduced by 20 percent, and the performance monitored again. If the system operates at this level of data load within acceptable parameters, then a full data capture takes place and the maximum performance of the storage array is defined to be at the observed levels of data and video stream parameters. Topology The test system topology included the following components: Multiple x86 servers running a VMWare ESXi 5.2 o These servers ranged from robust virtualization servers (Cisco UCS B230 M2 with 2.26 GHz processors and 2x10 cores) to older model servers (Dell R910s with 1.99GHz and 4x8 cores). Interconnection between Servers and storage of 10GE switching and GE to storage. VMware images for each Milestone server used with VMware VMXNet3 drivers for the virtual NICs. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (64 bit) used for the host operating systems Isilon NL400_36TB/24GB/2x10GE+2x1GE nodes in a 5 node cluster. 3 EMC - MTP Certification Summary
o Use of 1GE for all testing with Isilon o OneFS 7.0.x VNX 5300 and 7500 Arrays attached to Servers via 4 Gbps FC These servers supported a group of virtual machines. o (1) XProtect Management Server o (1) XProtect Management Client o (5) XProtect Smart Clients for Read simulations o (5) XProtect Recording Servers (with Virtual Simulators) The test topology is shown in Figure 1 below: Figure 1: 5 XProtect Recording Servers with camera simulators 122 Live video database volumes with retention period of 2 hrs Archive video database targets XProtect Corporate Management Client 123 \\172.18.22.221\share01_122 5 TB \\172.18.22.221\share01_123 XProtect Corporate Management Server 126 6 TB \\172.18.22.221\share01_126 128 SQL Server \\172.18.22.221\share01_128 129 \\172.18.22.221\share01_129 VMware architecture hosting XProtect Adminstration and Recording EMC VNX5300 (FC) Seven XProtect Smart Client workstations streaming recorded video with 10x streams per application EMC VNX7500 (FC) EMC Isilon X400 Providing 5x 4 TB Fileshare targets The above image represents the movement of video recordings in the test system during the period of time when the Milestone XProtect Recording Servers were archiving video from their EMC VNX based RAID 5 volume hosting the live video database, to the archive video database on an SMB volume on EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS, or an FC/iSCSI volume on EMC VNX array. In the test environment there were five Recording Servers, and one instance of the video feed simulator and video content files was placed on each virtual machine hosting an XProtect Recording Server. In addition to the writing to the ArchiveDB NAS Volume, the testing was completed with 10% and 20% video playback from the ArchiveDB during the tests. Possible limitations at this point would be throughput limitations of the livedb 4 EMC - MTP Certification Summary
volumes and ArchiveDB volumes, network interface throughput, or CPU data processing on the Recording Servers. Key Findings The EMC Isilon storage cluster and the EMC VNX storage array serve as a combined video recording and archiving solution supporting the Milestone XProtect VMS system. This solution performs at a level which supports 32 MBps per Milestone recorder, which is twice as much throughput as the benchmark levels determined by the Milestone Server and Storage Calculator. The system performed at a high level of data throughput, and with acceptable read/write latency, frame loss, CPU utilization, and archive event duration. The EMC Isilon storage cluster, and the EMC VNX storage array are certified solutions for use with XProtect VMS products. The maximum performance as tested and measured by the process described herein, of the EMC Isilon and EMC VNX solution, is listed below. Video Stream Parameters Live Video Database Write Latency (ms) Individual Video Stream Size Total Array Throughput (MBps) CODEC: H.264 40.92 0.99 MBps 158.87 - (approx. COMPRESSION: 30% 31.7 MBps for each Recording Server) FRAME RATE: 8 RESOLUTION: 3 Megapixels Integrators and end users designing, installing and operating surveillance systems which incorporate these solution components can have confidence that the system will record and archive video reliably. Testing and validation of this solution produced these key findings: FC- or iscsi-attached VNX can be used in place of internal server storage for both Live DB and Archive DB video storage. NAS-attached EMC Isilon clusters may be used starting with XProtect 2013 as Archive DB video storage up to 32MBps per Server for bandwidth. One NFS2 share per XProtect recording server is required if NAS EMC Isilon is used. Bandwidth to the Isilon clusters and VNX arrays for the Archive DB was not affected during numerous forced failures on the cluster. EMC Isilon scale out storage and EMC VNX storage are certified MTP solution. 5 EMC - MTP Certification Summary