the benefits of ibm flashsystems

IBM

Luca CompariniIBM STG Lab Services EMEA

The benefits of FlashSystems

2© Copyright IBM Corporation 2014

Objective

Agenda

– Introduction and Context– Why Flash, Why IBM– Business Value of using Flash

– OLTP– OLAP

– How applications could benefit from Flash– DB2– Oracle– VDI– SAP

– Economics of Flash (TCO / ROI examples)


Current IT Infrastructure Challenges

CPU performance has grown 10x in the last decadeCPU performance 8 – 10x increaseDRAM Speed 7 – 9xNetwork Speed 100xBus speed 20x

Storage has grown capacity, but unable to keep up in performance Disk Speed 1.2x increase

Systems are now Latency and IO boundResulting in a significant performance gap


Client responses to Performance Gap

Most Costly & Volatile

Time Consuming, Very Expensive &

Risky

Wasteful, Expensive & Ineffective with Storage Latency

Issues

Expensive & Ineffective for

Storage Performance Issues

Add More Memory

Typical Performance

Mitigation Tactics

HDD Performance Enhancement

Add CPUsTune & Modify

Application


Maximize / Optimize CPU utilization

... by reducing Latency


The cost of latency – people do not like to wait

Google: 0.4 seconds more, 20% traffic drop

Amazon: 1ms delay, $4.8 million in lost sales


More on latency...

1 microsecond to 1 second is like 1 second is to 11.5 days

A 1-SECOND

DELAY IN PAGE

LOAD TIME=

7%LOSS IN CONVERSIONS

11%FEWER PAGE VIEWS

16%DECREASE IN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

In dollar terms, this means that if your site typically earns $100,000 a day, this year you could lose $2.5 million in sales.$

Source: Aberdeen Group


Today's lesson: show the economics of Flash

If you consider price per TB (terabyte), FlashSystem storage is more expensive than SSD and HDD. However, if speed is important, flash configurations are cheaper. When evaluating a storage solution, always consider the total cost of ownership and the return on your investment. Storage solutions often affect the entire environment. For example, if you use FlashSystem storage to meet requirements that cannot be met with scale-out storage, you might also be able to eliminate costly hardware and software licenses. When you simplify your storage environment, you can reduce the resources and expense required to administer it.

Also consider how faster storage can improve application performance and reduce costs. Faster storage can decrease transaction time, improve the rate of transactions, and increase revenue. FlashSystem storage products can also help you reduce requirements for energy, cooling, and floor space.

As shown, clients report over a 30% cost savings by using FlashSystem storage as compared to disk. They also experience up to 38% overall lower software license costs due to fewer cores and lower software maintenance, and note as much as a 50% improvement in storage utilization, lower maintenance, and ease of management. With an improvement of 17% fewer servers, environments have fewer cores and network connections, and therefore lower maintenance costs. Lower operational support costs achieved by using less power, cooling, and required floor space result in up to a 35% savings.


What is Flash Memory

Flash memory is constantly-powered nonvolatile memory that can be erased and reprogrammed.Flash memory’s name comes from the erasure technique used where a section of memory cells

are erased in a single action or "flash“.

Flash memory is used to store data in consumer electronics: – cell phones, tablets and newer laptops.


Flash Quality Considerations

Flash type matters. Choose based on workload.Multi Level Cell / Enterprise-grade MLC / Single Level Cell


IBM Differentiators

• SLC and eMLC• Capacity varies from 1-10 TB for

710/810 and from 6-24 TB for 720/820

• High Availability option available with 5-20 TB capacity for 720/820

• Up to 570K IOPS• 5 GB/s Bandwidth

• Variable Stripe RAID™ to protect against chip failure

• Redundancy for power, data, and management

• 2D Flash RAID eliminates single point of failures

• Available integrated spare flash card limiting down time

• Error Correcting Code (ECC) at chip level

• 1U form factor- minimal footprint for best of breed ROI

• Two dual-port 8 Gb Fibre Channel controllers or dual-port 40Gb QDR InfiniBand controllers

• 400 watt power draw• Hot Swap flash modules

enabling uninterrupted operations

• Low latency of 100 µs (read) and 25 µs (write)

• Purpose-built, highly parallel design

• Maximize host CPU efficiency and productivity

Extreme Performance

Macro Efficiency

MicroLatency™

Enterprise Reliability

Superior Protection: Beyond Disk RAID

Self-Recovering Flash Modules

Avoid system rebuilds.

Protection Within And Across Flash

Modules

Variable Stripe SizesRead Disturb Mitigation

Automatic Read SweeperHigh-Speed Clock Recovery

Advanced Engineering =

Less Maintenance


IBM's Disk to Flash Storage Spectrum

15k SAS Hard DisksHigh performance spinning media

Flash AdaptersHigh IOPs Performance

IBM FlashSystem High capacity optimized flash storage system

Solid State DiskI/O performance in HDD form factor

Fla

sh O

pti

miz

ed

‘Hybrid’ HDDs with flash Improved I/O with spinning media capacities

7.2k SAS Hard DisksCapacity / Cost

Flash DrawersHigh IOPs Performance

5-15 Milli-

Seconds

100 Micro-

Seconds

< 1 Milli-

Seconds

IOP

S

La

ten

cy


Example from IBM Research: 20M IOPS

http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.fr/2013/04/mission-impossible-not-for-these-ibm.html2 Racks: 10 p730 + DB2 + IBM FlashSystem

http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.fr/2013/04/mission-impossible-not-for-these-ibm.html


1 Petabyte, 1 Rack

• 1 Petabyte: 1 Floor Tile

• 100 microsecond latency

• 22 Million IOPS

• 210 GB/s

• 12.6 KW powerLess power than the average 200TB array

22 Million IOPS Alternative


SSD vs Flash

SSD is not Flash

– Flash inside a Disk Enclosure– Controllers designed for Disk– Data protection outside SSD– Data Path handled by OS/Controllers outside SSD– Controller saturation limits scale

SSD is common in Hybrid Arrays

– Focus is to maintain functionality and consolidation– Focus on Tiering and Data Movement– SSD competes with all other disks for resources– SSD is a band-aid

SSD vs Flash: added latency

– Controllers– SW Layers– SAS Controllers HDD– Tiering– Shared Data Path


Using FlashSystem : why and how

Why:

– Designed to deliver the lowest latency – Designed to deliver the highest IOPS– With the best of efficiency

• Better economics• Low power consumption• Small footprint

How:

As standard shared primary data storage device, to deliver performance exponentially beyond that of most traditional array

As top tier of storage alongside traditional arrays in tiered storage architecture (EasyTier in SVC storage virtualization platform)


Using FlashSystem : when

When: To reasons to use Flash:

– Supplement existing infrastructure: assign FlashSystem storage IOP-hungry, latency sensitive, business critical workloads

– Decrease overall response times

– Increase efficiency and use across the IT stack

– Improve storage performance


Business Value of FlashSystem products

Use FlashSystem for:

– Online Transaction processing (OLTP)– Business Intelligence (BI)– Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)– High Performance Computing (HPC)– Content delivery solutions (such as cloud storage and video on demand)

Most common Industries:

– Financial– E-Commerce, Retail– HPC– Telecom, Media providers– Government


Flash with OLTP (Online Transaction Processing)

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0973.html

OLTP workloads are characterized by small, interactive transactions that generally require subsecond response times. The key performance indicator (KPI) of the transactional system is latency, because the user expects to receive the requested product information or to place an order quickly. Inability to meet these user expectations leads to customer dissatisfaction and revenue loss. IBM flash storage addresses these challenges by providing low latency, extreme performance, and efficient transaction management.

For most OLTP systems, the processor, memory, and I/O subsystem in a server are well balanced and are not considered performance bottlenecks. The major source of performance issues in OLTP environments is typically related to the storage I/O activity. The speed of traditional hard disk drive (HDD)-based storage systems does not match the processing capabilities of the servers. As a result, often a situation occurs where a powerful processor sits idle, waiting for the storage I/O requests to complete, negatively impacting user and business productivity. The negative impact on productivity extends the time to return on investments (ROI) and increases overall total cost of ownership (TCO). Therefore, storage IOPS performance and latency become strategic considerations for business. It is critical to ensure that the response time goals are met and that performance optimization is realized for other system resources (processor and memory).

FlashSystem storage systems address the challenges in the following ways:– Boosting the performance of existing applications and lowering cost per IOPS ratio without a need for

rearchitecture– Increasing user productivity with better response times, improving business efficiency– Reducing the number of solution components and shortening batch processing and backup times– Reducing TCO, by Increasing storage performance and capacity while decreasing power, cooling, and space

• Better CPU usage means reducing footprint, hence software license– Faster ROI because of better resource usage


You commonly use data warehouses are with OLAP workloads in decision support systems, such as financial analysis. Unlike OLTP, OLAP queries are typically complex, and they process large volumes of data from multiple sources. Accurate, real-time operational data is critical for analytics.

OLAP databases are normally separated from OLTP databases and tend to consolidate historical and reference information from multiple sources. Queries are submitted to OLAP databases to analyze consolidated data from different points of view to make better business decisions in a timely manner.

For OLAP workloads, a fast response time is critical to ensure that strategic business decisions can be made quickly in dynamic market conditions. Delays can significantly increase business and financial risks. Usually, decision making is stalled or delayed because of a lack of accurate, real-time operational data for analytics, which means missed opportunities for the following reasons:

– Inability to gain insight into a business– Inability to predict business outcomes– Explosion of volume, variety, and velocity of information

With FlashSystem analytics can be based on real-time data, and not yesterday’s news.

Flash with OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)



Extreme Performance – accelerate DB2


The environment:

– DB2 10.5: 10 x 8cores cluster members

– Power 780: 4 x nodes 128cores, 2TB memory

– FlashSystem 820: 4 x 1U units, 20TB each


DB2 and Flash best practices


What to put on Flash disks:

– the entire Database if• High number of concurrent users• Frequent random access to all tables• Small to Medium size Databases• Large read intensive Databases• Business Critical applications, such as order entry, online banking, high transactions

– Transaction LogsShould be stored on the fastest disk possible

– Temporary Table SpaceUsed when multi-table joins; to contain sorts that are too large to fit in memory; …)

– Frequently accessed tablesSometimes, just 5% - 10% of tables account for a large percentage of all database activity, and therefore, I/O

to storage. When a large number of users hit a table, they are likely going after different records and different attributes. As a result, the activity on that table is random. Disk drives are notoriously bad at servicing random requests for data. In fact, the peak performance of a disk drive drops as much as 95% when servicing random transactions.


DB2 and Flash best practices

Preferred reads:

To accelerate larger portions of the database, you can use a technique that involves mirroring of the entire database, or portions of the database (indexes and some table spaces) and using the copy that resides on flash storage to be the primary or preferred read copy.

There are several ways to implement preferred read: – IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller mirroring– Logical Volume Manager (LVM) mirroring.

http://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/TD106159


DB2 and Flash - best practices (continued)


Extreme Performance – accelerate Oracle

Customer Challenge – Most Oracle applications are highly read-intensive. As such, additional processing power alone does little or nothing to improve performance. By placing all read data on low latency flash storage, reads will be performed much faster, boosting Oracle performance by up to 12x over conventional disk systems with no tuning or changes to code or system architecture.

• IBM FlashSystem shared flash storage systems will– Decrease I/O wait time in mission critical Oracle workloads – Deliver the lowest latency available on any SAN platform– Accelerate commonly I/O-bound workloads, including

transactional, batch and complex analytics

IBM FlashSystem is a perfect alternative to ExaData.

Delivers Extreme Performance, Macro Efficiency, and Enterprise

Reliability for


Extreme Performance – accelerate VDI


Reliability for

• Customer Challenge - virtualized servers and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) push conventional storage systems to their performance limits. The result? Poor application response times and a bad customer experience. Introducing an IBM FlashSystem into virtualized environments will result in up to 16x faster response times for the most common virtualized applications. Couple this performance to the ‘log on’ or ‘boot’ storm and make system use productive again.

• IBM FlashSystem shared flash storage systems will– Virtualize databases without performance loss– Eliminate I/O density and hot spot issues that are

common to highly virtualized environments– Control and mitigate ‘log on’ or ‘boot’ storm

performance issue – Deliver storage consolidation without sacrificing

performance, thus driving a higher V:P ratios thus increasing server utilization


Extreme Performance – accelerate SAP


Reliability for

&

Customer Challenge – The vast majority of the world’s SAP databases consume less than 2TB of Storage. SAP is pushing clients to accelerate performance by adopting the HANA in-memory database architecture. This often leads to a significant re-architecture of the entire SAP infrastructure, which drives high cost and a risk of disruption in service delivery.

• IBM FlashSystem shared flash storage systems will:– Eliminate I/O bottlenecks in mission critical SAP

workloads– Provide the lowest latency of any SAN-based storage

solution for time-sensitive workloads with IBM MicroLatency™

– Enable a small, cost-effective pool of flash storage to deliver extreme performance improvements

– Support a phased approach to HANA adoption by delivering consistently higher performance for SAP BW workloads with no re-architecture required.


Economics of FlashSystem

Customer challenges:

– Accelerate Order Processing Time– Optimize IT Costs – Ensure High Availability – Ability to scale current environment by 10x

the benefits of ibm flashsystems

Technology