Accelerating Application Performance -- Tier-0

Accelerating Application Performance -- Tier-0 Richard Gillett Acopia Networks

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Abstract Accelerating Application Performance Tier-0 Traditional tiered storage or Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), approaches seek to move lower priority files to lower performing, less expensive disk in an effort to save on storage and backup costs. Users can expand this conventional cost savings approach to include tiering of data for the specific purpose of optimizing application performance. By utilizing a Tier-0 approach, specific data sets can be moved to higher performance, memory-based platforms, resulting in dramatic improvement in application performance This tutorial introduces the general concept of Tier-0 storage and then discusses the use of Tier-0 storage to accelerate the performance of applications that access storage using NAS protocols. 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 3

Agenda Context Traditional tiered storage A new kind of tiered storage High-performance storage options Application characteristics Solution example Summary Q&A 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 4

Context Application Acceleration is a term used in many contexts This tutorial discusses the application of fast storage (called Tier-0 ) to make applications run faster Tier-0 storage can be used to accelerate applications that use either block or NAS protocols This tutorial focuses on the use of Tier-0 storage to make applications accessing storage over NAS protocols (e.g. NFS and CIFS) run faster 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 5

Traditional NAS Tiered Storage Traditionally, NAS tiered storage has been used to integrate a lower cost storage pool for the purposes of off-loading Tier-1 storage of infrequently accessed data In a simple world: FC = Tier-1 and SATA = Tier-2 Simple policies based on file access or modify time can be used to identify candidates for migration to Tier-2 Assuming Tier-2 can be integrated without impact to the existing storage users, the cost savings are significant On the next slide, we will describe ways Tier-2 NAS storage can be integrated with existing Tier-1 NAS storage 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 7

Traditional NAS Tiered Storage Option 3 Virtualize Tier-1 and Tier-2 into a single pool Applications Virtualize Option1 Applications see another mount Option 2 Tier-2 appears behind Tier-1 stubs Tier-1 Default NAS (FC) Tier-2 Cost-focused NAS (SATA) Typically 2-4x savings on CapEx Additional savings on backup OpEx 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 8

A New Tier of NAS Storage Applications Tier-0 Performance Optimized (Memory) Tier-1 Default NAS (FC) Tier-2 Cost-focused NAS (SATA) Tier-3 Capacity Optimized Storage (Compressed SATA) 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 10

Definition of Tier-0 Tier 0 is a storage tier optimized and intelligently managed for the purpose of high-performance and deterministic serving to critical applications Tier-0 NAS is focused on accelerating applications that access storage over NAS protocols 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 11

Tier-0 NAS Building Blocks The basic requirement is that it be able to serve NAS protocols Though it sounds strange, a Tier-1 NAS system, intelligently managed specifically to accelerate application performance meets the definition of Tier-0 The specific application requirements will generally suggest the right building blocks Cache memory in the server and solid-state storage are the primary building blocks for memory-based Tier-0 On the next slide, we discuss the emerging opportunity to use mainstream servers with large memory configurations as Tier-0 servers 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 12

The Memory Opportunity Over the last year, the alignment between several important parameters has greatly increased: Cost of high-performance memory Size of the memory in a mainstream server Performance of the memory in mainstream servers Performance of the network in mainstream servers Size of an application s critical working set More details on this concept in a few slides 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 13

A Mainstream Server of 2007 2 fast processor cores 16GB memory 5 GBytes/sec memory bandwidth 500MB/sec network bandwidth 500MB/sec NAS serving bandwidth Cost from a mainstream server supplier: ~$5000 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 14

Achille s Heel An Achilles heel of any modern storage system is disk performance when the application has a randomlyaccessed working set larger than cache memory On the next slide, we show the results of a benchmark that highlights this behavior The benchmark uses 24 gigabit connected clients to perform random 4KB reads within a defined working set The tests were run against two servers NAS server with 3GB memory and a high-performance FC array Mainstream server configured as a file server with 16GB memory 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 15

Benchmark Results Working Set 1 GB NAS Server with 3GB memory (single 1Gb link) 120 (limited by 1Gb link) Server with 16 GB memory (4x1Gb channel) 450 (limited by 4x1Gb channel) 5 GB 21 450 10 GB 18 450 15 GB 17 450 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 16

Application Critical Working Set (ACWS) First a definition ACWS is the total size of the unique storage space that an application needs served at high-performance to avoid being bottlenecked by I/O How do you measure ACWS? The easiest way is often empirical. Serve your application with storage from a memory-based server(s) Repeat runs while shrinking the memory size until the application experiences I/O bottlenecks This is an approximation of the application s ACWS There are analysis/simulation based approaches but the details are beyond the scope of this tutorial Check out SNIA Tutorial: Storage Performance 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. Testing 18

ACWS Across Applications 100+ ACWS (GB) Large Scale Semiconductor Simulations Major Movie Rendering Trading Decisions Note: These values are estimates for various types of applications. The actual ACWS can vary greatly even within the same application space. 10 Large Scale Software Compilations 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 19

Placement Challenge In the general case, the position of a file within the namespace hierarchy and the corresponding optimal placement across Tier-1 and Tier-0 storage is unrelated For example, at a specific time file3 in dir2 is part of the application s critical working set (and therefore will be served from Tier-0) while other files within the same directory are not critical The example on the next slide will help to clarify this concept 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 20

Ideal Placement Example dir1 file1 dir2 dir-3 dir-4 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6 file7 file3 file4 file1 file2 file5 file6 file7 Tier-0 Tier-1 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 21

Desirable Characteristics Transparent integration with existing Tier-1 Applications see a logical view decoupled from physical location Analysis service to determine application characteristics (including CWS) and best placement policy Humans don t have to guess the best policy Flexible file-level placement capability Individual files can be dynamically placed anywhere within the Tier-0 and Tier-1 resources Ability to transparently scale Tier-0 capacity across the range of working set requirements 10 to 100GB is a good place to start 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 23

Application Acceleration Flow Application Servers Sophisticated Access Analysis Access Stream Policy Stream Analysis Fastest Fast Big Safe Other 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 24

Application Acceleration Example Application Servers Sophisticated Access Analysis Access Stream file1 file2 file1 Policy Stream Move file1 to Fastest Continuous Analysis Check out SNIA Tutorial: FAN File Area Networks Fastest Fast Big Safe Other 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 25

Three-Tier Solution Applications Real-time matching of application/business Acopia needs ARX and storage Virtualization capability Tier-0 Performance Optimized (Memory) Tier-1 Default NAS (FC) Tier-2 Cost-focused NAS (SATA) 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 26

Summary Tier-2 and Tier-0 are both approaches to better align storage and business needs Tier-0 focuses on making applications run faster and more predictability While almost any NAS server can be used as a Tier-0 server, mainstream servers with large memory configurations are very attractive building blocks for many applications Integrating Tier-0 into existing infrastructure is a challenge Network-based virtualization is one way to address this challenge 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 28

Q&A / Feedback Please send any questions or comments on this presentation to SNIA: trackstorage@snia.org Many thanks to the following individuals for their contributions to this tutorial. SNIA Education Committee Nigel Burmeister Woody Hutsell Robert Peglar Kirby Wadsworth Cheng Wu 2007 Storage Networking Industry Association. All Rights Reserved. 29

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