I was fortunate enough yesterday to get an introduction to QLogic’s new Mt. Rainier technology. Although Mt. Rainier allows for different configurations of SSD/Flash to be used, the one that caught my eye was the QLogic QLE10000 Series SSD HBAs. These have not started to ship as yet, but considering that the announcement was last September, one suspects that GA is not far off. As the name suggests, this is a PCIe Flash card, but QLogic have one added advantage – the flash is combined with the Host Bus Adapter, meaning that you get your storage connectivity and cache accelerator on a single PCIe card. This is a considerable advantage over many of the other PCI cache accelerators on the market at the moment, since these still require a HBA for SAN connectivity as well as a slot for the accelerator.
Tag Archives: Flash
An Introduction to Flash Technology
As many of you are aware, VMware made a number of announcements at VMworld 2012. There were three technical previews in the storage space. The first of these was on Virtual Volumes (vVOLS), which is aimed at making storage objects in virtual infrastructures more granular. The second was Distributed Storage, a new distributed datastore using local ESXi storage. The final one was Virtual Flash (vFlash). However, rather than diving into vFlash, I thought it might be more useful to take a step back and have a look at flash technologies in general.
WHIPTAIL Announce 4.1.1 Update
Last week, I presented at the UK National VMUG. I took the opportunity to catch up with Darren Williams (Technical Director, EMEA & APAC) of WHIPTAIL who was also presenting at the event. My first introduction to WHIPTAIL came last year when I first met Darren at another user group meeting, and I posted about their XLR8R array on the vSphere storage blog. Darren & I discussed the changes which WHIPTAIL has undergone in the past 12 months since we last spoke, including the launch of a new range of scale out storage arrays, as well as the new features in WHIPTAIL’s soon the be released 4.1.1 update.
Nimbus Data’s new Gemini Array & vSphere Integration
At VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of catching up with Scott Kline, Karthik Pinnamaneni & the rest of the team from Nimbus Data. In the weeks leading up to VMworld I read quite a bit about Nimbus Data’s new Gemini Flash Array, but my primary interest was to figure out what integration points existed with vSphere.
Gemini Array
Let’s start with a look at the Gemini Flash Array. The first thing that jumps out is that there is multiple protocols supported for both SAN & NAS. The array supports Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB and Infiniband protocols. There is no FCoE support at this time, and when I asked the guys why, they said that this is simply due to lack of demand. There is nothing that would prevent them implementing FCoE if there was sufficient demand for it, which they are not seeing right now.
An interesting fact is that Nimbus Data manufacture their own proprietary solid state drives. They purchase the NAND and build the drives themselves. There is a reason for this. One point that Scott and Karthik made to me was that many scale out storage offerings do not scale out their cache with their arrays. This then becomes the bottleneck. Nimbus Data address this by placing cache on each of their drives so as the storage scales out, so does the cache. They refer to this as their Distributed Cache Architecture (DCA).
The ‘secret-sauce’ at the heart of the Nimbus array is the HALO operating system. It provides administration, data protection, optimization, security, and monitoring of Nimbus Data arrays. The Nimbus Data array presents a single SSD device back to the ESXi host(s), either via a block protocol or NFS. Nimbus Data claim that their newer Gemini model can achieve 1.2 million IOPS in a 2U box. This is a latency of only 100 microseconds. Yes, that is 0.1 millisecond latency. The I/O block size used to achieve this figure was 4K, with 80% read & 20% write. They were also able to sustain a 12GB throughput with a 256K block size.
Flash Longetivity
One of the concerns many people have with flash is the lifespan. Nimbus Data are offering 10 year endurance with their drives. There are a number of thing they do to mitigate the wear out of their drives. One thing they do is cache the writes in DRAM. Once there is a full 64KB of writes in the cache, they do a full page write to Flash. Nimbus Data also have an algorithm which chooses between the individual flash cells. Each of the cells are rated, and the algorithm will choose the cells which have a higher rating over cells with a lower rating. All of these contribute to the MLC (Multi Level Cell) flash drives lasting the guaranteed 10 years. In fact, Scott told me that 2 years ago they deployed Nimbus Data Flash Arrays at eBay and the flash drives in these arrays have not yet reached 10% usage.
VAAI Integration
Nimbus Data currently support all three VAAI Block Primitives – ATS (Atomic Test & Set), Write Same (Zero) and XCOPY (Clone). They are working on VAAI-NAS primitives but these are not available yet. The driving factor here of course is the VCAI offload – the ability to offload linked clones to the storage array for View Desktop deployments.
Scott also told me that they are working on a management plugin for the new vSphere 5.1 web based client, but it wasn’t available for VMworld 2012. Right now the management is done by an external web based management tool. However I am led to believe that Nimbus Data will have a vCenter plugin for their management tool sometime in Q4 2012.
Business Continuance/Disaster Recovery
The Gemini array is designed to be Fault Tolerant and replication can be configured in either synchronous or asynchronous mode. Snapshots and replication currently work at the volume level. There is no integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager at this time. This is something Nimbus Data are hoping to have in place in the first half of 2013.
Overall, this is an amazing piece of technology. I would like to see even more integration with vSphere products and features going forward, as I personally think that this is a major differentiation factor in the storage market. Still, over 1 million IOPs in a 2U box – impressive stuff.
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Violin Memory & 1 Million IOPs from a single VM
Another Flash Array vendor that I wanted to meet with at this years VMworld in San Francisco was Violin Memory. For those of you who have been following the keynotes at VMworld 2012, one of the things which will have stood out will have been the 1 million IOPs from a single VM. Now 1 million IOPs isn’t something new. Last year, VMware’s performance team published a paper on how they achieved 1 million IOPs from a single vSphere 5.0 host running six virtual machines. But this year, we achieved 1 million IOPs from a single Virtual Machine. And guess what storage the VM was running on? Yep, a Violin Memory Flash Array.
At Violin’s booth at VMworld San Francisco, I caught up with an old friend and colleague of mine, Vinay Gaonkar, and Violin’s director of marketing, Ashish Gupta. They gave me a good overview of Violin Memory’s new 6×00 arrays, and we discussed the various vSphere integration points.
First I asked about the storage object which Violin surfaces up to the ESXi host & which storage protocols the array supports. They can create multiple LUNs of same capability inside of a given array and export them out to the ESXi host. Violin support Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and iSCSI (over 10GigE).
I then went on to ask about the VAAI primitives that Violin currently support on their arrays. There are none supported at present, but Ashish told me that they plan on supporting all the primitives in the very near future. They have started work on implementing the Write Same and XCopy primitives already, with others following soon.
My next question was about the snapshot and clone technology on the 6×000 series arrays. Is it VM-Centric or Volume-Centric? In other words, does it recognise the VMDK as a storage object or just a file on a LUN? Today it is LUN centric, but as Ashish points out, once Viloin integrates with VMware’s upcoming Virtual Volumes technology, their snapshots will of course become VM-Centric. I asked a similar question around their replication technology, and again Ashish stated that it was LUN orientated presently. Again, Virtual Volumes will make a difference here.
My next question was around BC/DR support, and if there were any plans for an SRM/SRA support with their replication technology. Ashish stated that yes, they plan to support Site Recovery Manager and they are hoping to have a solution in place in H1 2013.
One thing I noticed at the booth is that Violin have a vSphere plugin for Management & Monitoring (above). However this is currently C# so I asked about their plans for a web client plugin. Ashish again said that they expect to have a web client plugin for management and monitoring by H1 2013.
I finally finished with a question around Violin’s plans for a VASA plugin? You guessed it – H1 2013.
Violin Memory are a sponsor of VMworld EMEA and will be in Barcelona on October, 2012. If a Monster VM is what you need, then Violin Memory’s Flash Arrays are definitely worth checking out. 1 million IOPS in a 3U, with no single point of failure because of their fully redundant configuration and vRAID algorithms, is a very compelling solution indeed. They have two kinds of arrays, MLC and SLC. While some of the vSphere integration points are not yet there, its good to hear that there is a concerted effort from Violin to deliver on VAAI, VASA, SRM/SRA & a plugin for the web client.
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