Fsck It, We’ll Do It All With SSDs!

At Tech Field Day 8, we saw presentations from two vendors that had an all-flash SAN offering, taking on a storage problem that’s been brewing in data centers for a while now, and the skewed performance/capacity scale.

While storage capacity has been increasing exponentially, storage performance hasn’t caught up nearly that fast. In fact, performance has been mostly stagnant, especially in the area where it counts: Latency and IOPS (I/O Operations Per Second).

It’s all about the IOPS, baby

In modern data centers, capacity isn’t so much of an issue with storage. Neither is the traditional throughput metric, such as megabytes per second. What really counts is IOPS and latency/seek time. Don’t get me wrong, some data center applications certainly have capacity requirements, as well as potential throughput requirements, but for the most part these are easily met by today’s technology.

IOPS and latency are super critical for virtual desktops (and desktops in general) and databases. If you computer is sluggish, it’s probably not a lack of RAM or CPU, by and large it’s a factor of IOPS (or lack thereof).

There are a few tricks that storage administrators and vendors have up their sleeve to increase IOPS and drop latency.

In a RAID array, you can scale IOPS linerally by just throwing more disks at the array. If you have a drive that does 100 IOPS per second, add a second drive for a RAID 0 (mirror) and you’ve got double the IOPS. Add a third and you’ve got 300 IOPS (and of course add more for redundancy).

Another trick that storage administrators have up their sleeve is the technique known as “short stroking“, where only a portion of the drive is used. In a spinning platter, the outside is spinning the fastest, giving the best performance. If you only format that out portion, the physical drive head doesn’t have to travel as far. This can reduce seek time substantially.

Tiered storage can help with both latency and IOPS, were a combination of NVRAM, SSDs, and hard drives are combined.”Hot” data is accessed from high-speed RAM cache, “warm” data is on a bank of SSDs, and “cold” data would be stored on cheaper SAS or (increasingly) consumer SATA drives.

And still our demand for IOPS is insatiable, and the tricks in some cases aren’t catching up. Short stroking only goes so far, and cache misses can really impact performance for tiered storage. While IOPS scale linearly, the IOPS we need can sometimes end up with racks full of spinning rust, while only using a tenth of the actual capacity. That’s a lot of wasted space and wasted power.

And want to hear a depressing fact?

A high-end enterprise SAS 15,000 RPM drive (which spins faster than most jet engines) gives you about 150 IOPS in performance (depending on the workload of course). A good consumer grade SSD from Newegg gives you around 85,000 IOPS. That means you would need almost 600 drives to equal the performance of one consumer grade SSD.

That’s enough to cause anyone to have a Bill O’Reilly moment.

600 drives? Fuck it, we’ll do it with all flash!

No one is going to put their entire database or virtual desktop infrastructure on a single flash drive of course. And that’s where vendors like Pure Storage and SolidFire come into play. (You can see Pure Storage’s presentation at Tech Field Day 8 here. SolidFire’s can be seen here.)

The overall premise with the we’ll-do-it-all-in-flash play is that you can take a lot of consumer grade flash drives, use the shitload of IOPS that they bring, and combine it with a lot of storage controller CPU power for deduplication and compression. With that combination, they can offer an all-flash based array at the same price per gig as traditional arrays comprise of spinning rust (disk drives).

How many IOPS are we talking about? SolidFire’s SF3010 claims 50,000 IOPS per 1 RU node. That would replace over 300 drives of traditional drives, which I don’t think you can put in 1RU. Pure Storage claims 300,000 IOPS in 8U of space. With a traditional array, you’d need over 2000 drives, also unlikely to fit in 8 RU. Also, imagine the power savings, with only 250 watts needed for SoldFire’s node, and 1300 Watts for the PureStorage cluster.  And Both allow you to scale up by adding more nodes.

You wire them into your SAN the traditional ways, as well. The Pure Storage solution has options for 10 Gbit iSCSI and 8 Gbit Fibre Channel, while the SolidFire solution is iSCSI only. (Sadly, neither support FCoE or FCoTR.)

For organizations that are doing virtual desktops or databases, an all-flash storage array with the power savings and monster IOPS must look more tantalizing than a starship full of green-skinned girls does to Captain Kirk.

There is a bit of a controversy in that many of the all-flash vendors will tell you capacity numbers with deduplication and compression taken into account. At the same time, if the performance is better than spinning rust even with the compression/dedupe, then who cares?

So SSD it is. And as anyone who has an SSD in their laptop or desktop will tell you, that shit is choice. Seriously, I get all Charlton Heston about my SSD.

You’ll pry this SSD from my cold, dead hands

It’s not all roses and unicorn-powered SSDs. There are two issues with the all-flash solution thus far. One is that they don’t have a name like NetApp, EMC, or Fujitsu, so there is a bit of a trust issue there. The other issue is that many have some negative preconceptions about flash, such as they have a high failure rate (due to a series of bad firmwares from vendors) and the limited write cycle of memory cells (true, but mitigaitable). Pure Storage claims to have never had a drive fail on them (Amy called them flash driver whispers).

Still though, check them (and any other all-SSD vendor) out. This is clearly the future in terms of high performance storage where IOPS is needed. Spinning rust will probably rule the capacity play for a while, but you have to imagine its days are numbered.