Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By Vinny Choinski
August 2011
Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3
Background ............................................................................................................................................................... 3 Avere FXT Series ....................................................................................................................................................... 4
ESG Lab Validation Highlights ..................................................................................................................... 14 Issues to Consider ....................................................................................................................................... 14 The Bigger Truth ......................................................................................................................................... 15 Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................... 16
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Introduction
This report documents the results of ESG Lab hands-on testing of the Avere FXT Series NAS appliances. The Avere FXT Series appliances are designed to provide efficient high performance data tiering and scale-out clustering to any NAS solution by separating performance scaling from capacity scaling to deliver each more efficiently.
Background
NAS data continues to see fast-paced growth while management and efficiency problems continue to plague storage administrators. Administrators are challenged with managing multiple NAS solutions with a growing number of large file systems. According to ESG research, one-fifth of users are reporting NAS capacity growth of more than 50% per year (up from only 13% who reported greater than 50% annual NAS growth in a 2008 ESG storage survey), and 54% of organizations with NAS installations are indicating that their storage capacity requirements are growing by at least 20% per year. 1 As organizations look for ways to effectively control and manage enormous NAS data growth, business managers are looking to their IT organizations to deliver smart, efficient, and cost effective solutions. As shown in Figure 1, improved business process, better return on investment/speed of payback, and OPEX and CAPEX reduction rank among the top five considerations for justifying IT investments over the next 12 to 18 months. 2 Figure 1. Most Important Considerations for Justifying IT Investments Which of the following considerations do you believe will be most important in justifying IT investments to your organizations business management team over the next 12-18 months? (Percent of respondents, N=611, three responses accepted)
Reduction in operational expenditures (i.e., labor, utilities, materials and other ongoing costs associated with operating an application, system, or business process) Business process improvement
43%
39%
37%
Improved security / risk management Reduction in capital expenditures (i.e., purchases of equipment and other fixed assets) Improved regulatory compliance
35%
24%
19%
16%
20% 30% 40% 50%
1 2
Source: ESG Research Report, Scale-out Storage Market Trends, December 2010. Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2011.
The FXT hardware platform comes in a 2U form factor supporting both 1 GbE and 10 GbE networking. The nodes can be clustered for high availability and are offered in the following configuration options:
FXT 2750 512 GB SSD (SLC), 72 GB RAM, 2 GB NVRAM, 2 10GE & 6 1GE ports FXT 2550 3.6 TB HDD (SAS), 72 GB RAM, 2 GB NVRAM, 2 10GE & 6 1GE ports FXT 2300 1.2 TB HDD (SAS), 64 GB RAM, 1 GB NVRAM, 2 10GE & 2 1GE ports
The FXT Series separates NAS service functions from mass storage functions. It uses a tiered file system (TFS) schema to dynamically place data on the most optimal storage media. Active data is moved to fast media on the FXT Series, enabling dense, cost effective SATA storage to be used on the back end for more persistent data. The cluster can be configured with an unlimited number of nodes for linear performance scale. The FXT Series provides comprehensive monitoring and global namespace management across all nodes.
Getting Started
Preparing the FXT Series for use requires performing the initial setup of the cluster from pre-racked nodes with power and network connectivity already provided. The nodes were racked in the lab test bed with VLANs and NAS storage pre-configured. ESG Lab Testing ESG Lab began testing the FXT Series by powering up a node and connecting to the FXT Series setup page via a web browser. The setup process was straightforward and easy to navigate. As shown in Figure 4, the device is configured from a form template within the setup web pageit can be configured manually by filling in the form or by pointing to a configuration file. ESG Lab conducted the manual process using the configuration template. The form required standard network and naming information, with help fields available for most entries. Figure 4. FXT Series Setup Page
Next, ESG Lab explored performance-monitoring capabilities by selecting the Dashboard tab from the FXT Series GUI. The GUI allows multiple parameters to be set up and monitored. Figure 5 shows the Cluster Wide Ops/Second view of the configuration. ESG Lab selected client IOs/sec and MASS storage synchronous and asynchronous IOs/sec to compare the performance seen on the client side with the load on the backend MASS or NAS filer storage. Figure 5. Performance Monitoring
Source: ESG Research Report, Scale-out Storage Market Trends, December 2010.
As shown in Figure 7, ESG Lab used the FXT Series GUI to add a third node to an existing two-node cluster. Node (vantage25) was selected from a list of available nodes. A simple click on the Allow to join tab launched the process in the background. Figure 7. Performance Scalability
Lastly, ESG Lab used the FXT cluster to build a single global namespace that spanned multiple back-end filers. As shown in Figure 8, export (/vol/bryansim) on filer (grapnel) could be found at namespace path (/ESG/HR). Using the Avere GUI, ESG Lab added an existing export (/vol/cust) from filer (northhill) to the same namespace (/ESG) at path (/ESG/finance). This allowed directories from multiple back-end filers to be presented to a host under a common mount point. Figure 8. Capacity Scalability and Simplified Namespace Management
Source: ESG Research Report, Scale-out Storage Market Trends, December 2010.
10
IO/sec
Random Write
Direct NAS Avere FXT
Random Read
11
ESG Lab also tested throughput performance for the direct NAS configuration and the FXT 2750 cluster. An Iometer sequential read workload was used with 24 GB, 120 GB and 240 GB datasets. As shown in Figure 10, the FXT 2750 cluster outperformed the direct NAS configuration by 1.2 times to 3.4 times as the dataset size increased. Figure 10. Throughput vs. Dataset
ESG Lab validated the performance of typical software development tasks by auditing simulated patch and compile process results created by the compilebench utility. As shown in Figure 11, the FXT 2750 cluster outperformed the direct NAS configuration, completing the patch process 4.9 times faster and the compile process 3.2 times faster. Figure 11. Improved Throughput with Avere FXT CompileBench Throughput Results
800 700 600
MB/sec
Patch
Direct NAS Avere FXT
Compile
12
Next ESG Lab audited Averes published SPECsfs results. As shown in Figure 12, the FXT Series was able to generate 1828 (ops/sec/disk) while still maintaining a good overall throughput of 131,595 (ops/sec). As detailed in Table 1, it should be noted that the FXT configuration was the only configuration in the summary chart to leverage SATA disk and the total number of disks was a fraction of the other configurations tested. Figure 12. SPECsfs Results Summary
SPECsfs (ops/sec/disk)
SPEC
(ops/sec/disk) File systems Throughput (ops/sec) ORT SSD FC/SAS SATA Total disks
Avere FXT
1828 1 131,591 1.38 0 48 24 72
EMC VNX
1098 8 497,623 0.96 436 21 0 457
NetApp FAS6240
662 2 190,675 1.17 0 288 0 288
EMC Celerra
446 4 135,521 1.92 0 304 0 304
NetApp FAS6080
357 2 120,011 1.95 0 336 0 336
EMC Isilon
331 1 1,112,705 2.54 140 3220 0 3360
On average, the FXT Series achieved a 6X reduction in disk, power, and space requirements. Avere demonstrated linear performance scaling with single-node results of 22k ops/sec, 2-node results of 44k, and 6-node results of 132k. There were no expensive SSD devices used in the FXT solution. The total number of drives for the FXT Series was a fraction of the number of disk used by the other configurations in this SPECsfs summary. The FXT solution leveraged a commodity Supermicro server with a Linux OS and 24 SATA drives as the backend NAS filer. None of the other solution leveraged dense, inexpensive SATA drives. Avere could achieve similar results with a SATA-based backend NAS filer such as NetApp FAS 2000/3000 Series or EMC/Isilon X-Series. The second highest (ops/sec/disk) solution in this summary was configured 436 SSD drives.
13
Finally, ESG Lab audited real world results from an end-user environment. The client environment compared the performance of an Avere FXT 2700 two-node cluster to an enterprise-class direct NAS configuration with solid state cache and 15k FC drives in an Oracle database environment. Typical daily business processes were run against both configurations on a 1 GB and 10 GB network. As shown in Figure 13, an Oracle bulk update process was run with one through eight clients. The FXT 2700 was able to process 2.8 times more updates at six clients than the direct NAS configuration. Figure 13. Oracle Bulk Update Performance
Source: ESG Research Report, Scale-out Storage Market Trends, December 2010.
14
Issues to Consider
The FXT Series has no class of service policy to distinguish between SSD- and SAS-based FXT Series hardware platforms. Avere clusters are deployed as SSD or SAS-only today. The maximum per node SSD configuration is currently 512 GB. There is currently no progress status bar available in the FXT Series GUI. It would be good to know that a launched process was still running while conducting administrative tasks. ESG Lab would like to see a built-in data migration option for the FXT Series. Data migration via the FXT Series would add enormous flexibility for NAS replacement/refresh and consolidation.
15
16
Appendix
Table 2. ESG Lab Avere FXT Test Bed
Storage
(2) NetApp FAS Model FAS3240 Data ONTAP 8.0.1
Network
(2) Arista Switch 1U Rack Mount Network switch Model DCS-7148S-R Software Version 4.6.1
Software
VMware ESXi Oracle Iometer Compilebench Version 4.1 Version 11.2.0.2 2008.06.18 Version 0.6