Microsoft SQL Server 2014 in a Flash Combine Violin s enterprise-class storage arrays with the ease and flexibility of Windows Storage Server in an integrated solution so you can achieve higher performance and efficiency for your SQL Server 2014 databases and business critical Microsoft applications Abstract Microsoft SQL Server 2014 scales to support large servers in the datacenter. Yet legacy storage solutions are keeping SQL Server databases and related applications from reaching their full potential, which means expensive server investments are underutilized. The ideal storage solution would deliver enterprise-class high-performance storage that is tightly integrated with the Windows environment and holistically managed by native Windows tools and utilities. This would increase the value of existing human and technology investments while transforming SQL Server performance and economics. The end result is enhanced business efficiency, resiliency, and ROI for all of IT.
Table of Contents Introduction... 3 Performance challenges in SQL Server 2014 environments... 3 Higher performance storage for SQL Server 2014... 4 Violin Windows Flash Array + Windows Storage Server 2012 R2... 4 Microsoft ecosystem friendly... 5 What is SMB Direct?... 5 Performance that changes business... 5 Enhanced support for new features in SQL Server 2014... 6 Resiliency for continuous availability... 7 Scalability to grow efficiently... 7 Conclusion... 8 Pg. 2
Introduction Microsoft SQL Server 2014 has grown far beyond that of a simple workgroup database. It is a mature and sophisticated platform suitable for large enterprise workloads such as scalable online transaction processing (OLTP), parallel data warehouses (DW), business intelligence (BI), and cloud computing. SQL Server is business critical to enterprises today and in the future. Many organizations have grown up around SQL Server; it is an integral part of their operations. Likewise, businesses expect their SQL Server environment will grow with them; however, limitations in the current IT infrastructure have made achieving this goal difficult, if not impossible. The scalability of SQL Server has increased dramatically with the 2012 and 2014 versions of the product. SQL Server Enterprise edition running on Windows Server 2012 can support up to 64 physical processors and 640 logical processors. The Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Fast Track Data Warehouse reference architecture illustrates how much SQL Server s capabilities have matured to be able to deliver proven performance and scalability for data warehouse workloads. At the same time, Microsoft s selfservice Business Intelligence initiative is empowering Excel and SharePoint users with new ways to access SQL Server data, which in turns raises demand for SQL Server resources. For most organizations, SQL Server is being deployed within and outside of centralized IT control. Any tactically deployed SQL Server resources are most likely not optimized for performance nor manageability, including safeguards against outages. Windows Hyper-V Server virtualization is mature and scalable and offers a way to recentralize many SQL Server deployments and ensure their availability without taking away local or line of business control over the application. In a nod to future possibilities, many are investigating how Windows Azure SQL Database may prove to be an integration consideration later. Performance challenges in SQL Server 2014 environments Although CPU performance and network connectivity have grown dramatically over the past several years, improvements in storage have largely been limited to increased capacity, not performance. Legacy storage solutions (disk drives) perform best when read and write operations are linear. Yet modern workloads such as databases and virtual machines (VMs) are filled with random I/O requests, which results in high latency and a negative impact on application performance. Various striping techniques, solid-state drives, and optimization algorithms seek to improve operations yet I/O performance remains lacking. To compensate, IT managers over provision storage and/or add cache to controllers in an attempt to garner enough I/O capacity; however, this approach is inefficient and enforces continued spending on capacity when the need is actually for IOPS. Poor storage performance leads to poor CPU utilization. CPUs spend more time waiting than executing, which means servers are expensive and mostly idle investments. In an attempt to scale beyond the workgroup level, some IT directors have ported Windows applications to another storage platform such as a SAN, or different application altogether. For example, former SQL Server data may have graduated to an Oracle implementation. However, such a migration may be viewed as a potential loss of control by the line of business owner, who might decide to redeploy data on a local SQL Server database, thus losing any data protection afforded by IT. Another way to raise CPU utilization is server virtualization. Yet ironically, virtualization drives random I/O even higher and some virtualization solutions raise server overhead. All of this I/O crossing the network consumes bandwidth that might be put to better use. Organizations are faced with an unpleasant reality that their only choice in responding to growth has meant scaling the inherent inefficiency and expense of legacy storage solutions. Pg. 3
Storage area networks (SANs) typically require vendor-specific tools and skill sets. Organizations cannot easily leverage the management skills of their existing Microsoft-savvy staff, which reduces flexibility and increases operational expense. Even some direct attached storage (DAS) solutions may require special handling or expertise in their set up and operation. This is just one shortcoming of bifurcated storage where Ethernet-based storage is the norm for file services (the bulk of the Microsoft universe), and dedicated block-based storage supports high-performance applications such as SQL Server and Hyper-V. Ensuring continuous availability is a challenge, but essential. For example, AlwaysOn Availability Groups are one approach to maintain SQL Server availability; however, there are limitations. AlwaysOn is hostbased and does not fully mirror all data such as system databases, login data, scheduler tasks, etc. Setting up availability groups is time consuming and requires ongoing administration. Replication is an alternative but asynchronous replication can suffer data loss if the primary array goes down. Synchronous mirroring is more resilient, but it is expensive and has a slow two-phase commit process. In either case, close coordination of application and storage administrators is needed during scheduled maintenance. From these challenges, it is clear that a new approach is needed to deliver the performance and scalability required for your SQL Server environment to achieve its full potential without breaking the IT budget. Higher performance storage for SQL Server 2014 To address the shortcomings of legacy storage for SQL Server environments, Violin Memory and Microsoft have co-developed the Violin Windows Flash Array (WFA). The WFA combines Violin s patented flash storage, Microsoft s fast SMB Direct protocol, and Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 so your SQL Server databases and applications can have storage that easily meets your needs. Violin Windows Flash Array + Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 The WFA is based upon the Violin All Flash Array 6000. Dual memory gateways run Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 with support for SMB Direct through RDMA-enabled network interface cards. The WFA features low latency and wide stripe vraid accelerated switched memory for maximum performance. SMB Direct runs at PCIe speeds to deliver the features of a SAN at the price of NAS with the performance of DAS. With the WFA, you get maximum performance for every byte every time. Table 1: Violin Windows Flash Arrays by model Windows Flash Array model WFA-64 VIMM Count and VIMM Capacity 64 x 1TiB Form Factor / Flash type 3U / MLC Raw Capacity (TiB / TB) 64 / 70 Usable Capacity (TiB / TB)* 40 / 44 I/O Connectivity 10GbE, 56G IB Maximum 4KB IOPS (Mixed) >750k IOPS Maximum Bandwidth (100% Reads) 4GB/s Nominal Latency 500 µsec (mixed) *Maximum usable capacity with 84% format level Windows Storage Sever 2012 R2 delivers proven storage technologies including SMB 3.0, deduplication, thin provisioning, data mirroring, live migration, Scale-out File Server (SOFS), Storage Spaces, and data encryption. The SMB 3.0 protocol boosts network storage performance. In particular, SMB Direct (SMB 3 over RDMA) enables remotely stored data to be read directly into server memory. Microsoft optimized the Storage Server kernel for tight integration with the WFA to maximize performance. When combined with Violin s optimized flash technology, the result is remote storage performing like blazing fast local storage. Pg. 4
SQL Server databases and related applications are business critical; ensuring continuous availability is key. The WFA helps you attain 24x7 operations through multi-layered hardware and software resiliency. Active-Active clustering delivers continuous uptime and SMB Multichannel ensures that cluster node connectivity is maintained. Non-disruptive volume extensibility is available with the SOFS or through thinly provisioned Storage Spaces, so you can add capacity to existing volumes without taking them offline. With the WFA, you can get higher utilization and performance with a smaller, less expensive IT footprint than traditional SANs. You can scale up or out as the future demands. You may find that you no longer need dedicated storage to support your SQL Server databases and applications. Microsoft ecosystem friendly Violin Memory and Microsoft co-developed and optimized the WFA to leverage its unique performance profile. SMB 3.0 and SMB Direct are part of the Microsoft strategic roadmap for network storage and the WFA fully supports these protocols to deliver performance and scalability not available elsewhere. There is no need for third-party storage management tools or skill sets. Your existing Microsoft admin staff can manage all of your servers, storage, and applications with Microsoft System Center and PowerShell. The tight integration of the WFA with Microsoft management tools delivers a holistic view of your Microsoft environment for simplified and cost-effective management of physical and virtual servers. Figure 1: Wait State Reduction Enabled by Windows Flash Array Performance that changes business What is SMB Direct? The WFA addresses the traditional bottlenecks that limit performance by delivering a state-of-the-art storage solution where speed, scale, and resiliency combine to deliver operational and financial efficiency. The use of SMB Direct can improve the performance of most any vendor s storage and we expect that over time most will offer this support. However, the combination of SMB Direct with Violin s unique flash-based storage solution takes performance to the next level. With the WFA, you get ultrafast file access with sustained throughput of up to 1 million 4K IOPS along with support for large sector (4K) storage. As illustrated in Figure 1, your SQL Servers will spend more time doing than waiting so you can support additional workloads with existing resources and achieve faster response times. Our support for SMB 3.0 delivers a rich set of storage services that will help ensure you can achieve the highest performance and efficiency. Meeting growing demand has strained databases as legacy storage solutions hit their design limits. The WFA is particularly suited for transaction-oriented workloads such as SQL Server and others including Hyper-V virtualization that have a high degree of random I/O activity. By raising the available I/O to meet processor demand, The WFA enables SQL Server to spend more time processing data as opposed to waiting for it. This means you can optimize CPU investments across SQL workloads to meet your performance objectives. Plus, you can run multiple and mixed workloads with consistent performance. Pg. 5
With the WFA, you can improve SQL Server performance today while aligning with Microsoft s technology roadmap for networked storage. You can benefit from full support for the SMB 3.0 feature set operating on a low-latency (~500 microseconds) all-flash SMB Direct solution. Tight integration with Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 ensures support for large sector (4K) storage as well as other performance optimizations collaboratively developed between Microsoft and Violin. As illustrated in Figure 2, early customer testing reveals that the WFA delivers up to 50% higher SQL read performance and up to twice the throughput of SQL writes compared with an industry standard all-flash array. The WFA is well suited to the short block random read/write workloads associated with OLTP, which is a critical application for most any enterprise. Figure 2: Customer Observed Performance Improvements, WFA vs. Industry Standard All Flash Array Our parallel random read/write across all of the flash is excellent for parallel data warehouses where there are many simultaneous related queries. Connecting through SMB Direct can free up to 30% of CPU usage; these cycles could be put towards BI initiatives or other value added activities. Of course, if consolidation or virtualization of SQL Server instances is your preferred approach, the WFA can enable you to increase virtualization density. Unlike legacy solutions, with the WFA there is no wasted capacity due to drive striping to improve performance. Our all-flash arrays do not suffer from write cliff due to the non-blocking nature of our distributed garbage collection. The WFA s architecture delivers maximum performance for every byte every time. The bottom line is that you can experience higher SQL Server database and application performance with an optimized storage platform that is smaller and with a less expensive IT footprint. Enhanced support for new features in SQL Server 2014 One of the selling points of SQL Server 2014 is its new in-memory processing capability for OLTP. The thought of transactions performing up to 20 times faster is certainly music to many an administrator s ears; however, do they recognize that this means that they also need 20 times faster storage? At a minimum, maintaining in-memory performance requires low-latency persistent storage for the transaction log. But what of out-of-memory tables, and other disk-based database object? Most databases do not conveniently fit into the server s RAM. Similarly, on start-up, all data for in-memory optimized tables is loaded from persistent storage. Until this step is complete, the database cannot go online. Thus, the larger the footprint of in-memory tables, the longer the startup delay. While in-memory processing can boost transaction speed dramatically, without high performance persistent storage supporting the rest of the DBMS, database performance will be constrained. When SQL Server 2014 workloads access the WFA through SMB Direct, you get ultra-fast read and write commits. Customer performance testing has revealed that the WFA delivers up to twice the SQL writes throughput and up to 50% higher SQL read performance and compared with an industry standard all-flash array. So, you can take full and consistent advantage of in-memory OLTP in SQL Server 2014. In addition, SMB Pg. 6
Direct can reduce application CPU demand by up to 30%. With Hyper-V virtualization, you can optimize CPU cycles without performance penalty of other virtualization solutions. Resiliency for continuous availability With the WFA, you benefit from continuous availability of Microsoft SharePoint and other in-house developed applications using SQL Server data stores along with reduced risk to operations through multiple layers of hardware and software based protection. Windows Failover Clustering in conjunction with the WFA hardware can sustain any single point of failure to ensure continuous availability. SMB Multichannel I/O provides bandwidth trunking as well as enhanced node-to-node network connectivity and availability. Should you desire a high availability configuration, deployment is option-rich and as simple as software configuration. You can mirror any share with the click of a mouse. In addition, transport-level encryption guards against eavesdropping or other unauthorized data disclosure. Scalability to grow efficiently With the WFA, you can optimize CPU investments across SQL Server workloads to achieve greater scale and flexibility in how you maintain consistent performance while adding users, threads, tables, LUNs, etc. As illustrated in Figure 3 on page 7, the superior performance of the WFA will enable your organization to support a greater number or larger size of SQL Server workloads with existing infrastructure. With increased I/O capacity, freed up CPU cycles, and decreased latency, our all-flash arrays scale predictability by delivering consistent performance even as your mix of workloads change. Support for Windows Storage Spaces lets you scale up your file shares to meet growing demand. You can also scale out as the WFA also supports Scale-out File Server (SOFS) for non-disruptive volume extensibility that lets databases grow without going offline. You can scale up to four arrays (eight nodes) per cluster. Ensuring continuous availability is especially important as SQL Server is the back end for many applications and their data growth is driving SQL Server demand. For example, the Microsoft self-service Business Intelligence (BI) initiative interconnects SharePoint Server and Microsoft Excel with the Microsoft SQL Server BI platform. Through Excel, self-service BI empowers end users to process millions of rows of data, and provide customer reporting without involving the IT department. Figure 3: Observed Performance Improvements from Customer Testing, WFA vs. Industry Standard All Flash Array Consolidation or virtualization of SQL Server workloads is unleashed with the WFA. SQL Server can now scale to enterprise workloads while delivering consistent service levels so you can eliminate application growth barriers, which increases your investment protection. Storage Live Migration streamlines virtual machine (VM) migration through direct WFA to WFA communication that bypasses the VM host to reduce server impact and complete the process more rapidly. This delivers increased flexibility and simplicity in addressing potential service interruptions due to sudden workload spikes or seasonal peaks. In addition, Hyper-V does not suffer from the up to the 20% overhead of competitive virtualization solutions so you can consolidate workloads such as SQL Server with little, if any, performance penalty. Pg. 7
Since you can consolidate and scale SQL Server to meet your performance needs, there is no imperative to migrate to another platform. In fact, you might find that the combination of SQL Server and the WFA yields better performance than competitive solutions, even DAS. Developers can easily establish new test beds, which closely match the speed and architecture of the production environment, for development, testing or quality assurance for your strategic applications. Roll out and roll up is quick and simple, with minimal waiting on IT administrators. What s more, the WFA is a very efficient private cloud platform. As you consider the role private and/or public clouds might play in your IT infrastructure, be assured that the WFA is a future-proof technology investment with a defined transition or interaction path for Windows Azure SQL Database. Conclusion Legacy storage solutions are built for capacity, not I/O performance. Yet today s Microsoft environments are performance oriented and this results in complex, expensive, and hard-to-scale solutions being deployed to meet the needs of business critical SQL Server databases and applications. The Violin Windows Flash Array is a fundamentally different and better storage solution for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 environments that addresses the performance shortcomings of legacy storage while enhancing the performance of in-memory database objects. The WFA is an all-flash active-active HA multi-node cluster platform with native Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 that delivers rich file and storage services by putting Windows intelligence in the storage array. Support for the SMB 3.0 protocol and SMB Direct means that your storage runs at PCIe speeds with the features of a SAN with the performance of DAS at the price of NAS. You can unleash your Windows application performance and free up existing resources to do more. In fact, the performance of the WFA is so high that you could choose to eliminate your existing dedicated storage infrastructure that is supporting your high performance applications such as SQL Server databases or Hyper-V virtualization. With the WFA, you can simplify your management paradigm with Microsoft System Center and PowerShell to achieve holistic control and flexibility of your Windows-based physical and virtual infrastructure. You can consolidate and virtualize a mix of workloads while maximizing your Windows performance on a storage architecture that is simpler and faster, and on Microsoft s strategic roadmap at substantial cost savings. If you would like to learn more about how the Violin Windows Flash Array can dramatically improve your SQL Server performance, please contact your Violin Memory representative today. Pg. 8
About Violin Memory Business in a Flash. Violin Memory transforms the speed of business with high performance, always available, low cost management of critical business information and applications. Violin s All Flash optimized solutions accelerate breakthrough CAPEX and OPEX savings for building the next generation data center. Violin s Flash Fabric Architecture (FFA) speeds data delivery with chip-to-chassis performance optimization that achieves lower consistent latency and cost per transaction for Cloud, Enterprise and Virtualized mission-critical applications. Violin's All Flash Arrays and Appliances, and enterprise data management software solutions enhance agility and mobility while revolutionizing datacenter economics. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. For more information, visit www.violin-memory.com. Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/violinmemory Pg. 9 Violin Memory 4555 Great America Parkway, Suite #150, Santa Clara, CA 95054 violin-memory.com 02-0205