Eliminating the I/O Blender Realizing “World Class” Storage Performance in Virtual Server Environments

Welcome and Introduction Storage has been the Achilles Heel of Server Virtualization for many years Many techniques have been tried to minimize the problem A successful approach must address the root cause: the I/O Blender

Where It All Began Less HW to Manage Dynamic Provisioning Dynamic Provisioning Fewer Staff Required Improved Resource Utilization Lower IT Costs Lower Energy Bills More Up-Time Fun at Parties!

Early Challenges Applications vary in terms of resource and performance requirements… So, server configurations differ. Storage LAN

The Highest Common Denominator To realize the benefits touted by the hypervisor vendors (VMotion, automatic server failover, migration for efficiency), EVERY potential host must be enabled with connectivity required by the most demanding application… Increasing complexity, cost and energy consumption… NICs HBAs

Maybe It’s The Storage Itself…or Not SERVERS STORAGE High CPU Processing Cycles.. Short Storage I/O Queues…

Workarounds 2010: vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) introduced in vSphere 4 – 9 non-standard primitives enabling unapproved SCSI commands to offload storage chores from inefficient ESX servers 2011: “Enhanced” and Reissued in vSphere 5, expanding support for thin provisioning and NAS 2011: VMware vSphere Storage Appliance – neither a SAN nor NAS, but a repository for VMDK 2014: Virtual SAN Virtual Servers NAS/ iSCSI FC/SAS SANs

Enter the I/O Blender Effect STORAGE I/O Okay. RAW I/O Problem must be ahead of disk storage interconnect

I/O Blender in a Nutshell A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 RANDOM WRITES TRADITIONAL I/O PATH APP -> SERVER -> HBA -> DISK

I/O Blender in a Nutshell RANDOM WRITES VIRTUAL SERVER I/O PATH VMs -> HYPERVISOR -> DISK A1 A2 A3 C1 B1 B3 B4 C1 A2 C2 B2 C3 B5 C4 HPERVISOR A1 B1 B2 B3 C3 C2 A3

C1 A2 A1 B1 B2 B3 C3 C2 A3 Simple Flash Caching Not a Fix RANDOM WRITES ADD FLASH VMs -> HYPERVISOR -> FLASH CACHE DISK A1 A2 A3 C1 B1 B3 B4 C2 B2 C3 B5 C4 HPERVISOR

Smart Caching Provides an Answer RANDOM WRITES ADD FLASH VMs -> HYPERVISOR -> SMART CACHE DISK HPERVISOR LSFS A1 B3 A2 C1 A4 B1 C2 B2 SEQUENTIAL WRITE

StarWind Software LSFS Paves the Way DAS Direct Attached Storage Direct Attached Storage Direct Attached Storage NODES Hypervisor Agnostic Write Anywhere File Layyour (WAFL) & RAID DP Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL™) & RAID 6 Log-Structured File System (LSFS) & Virtual SAN Any RAID Level Any hardware

Key Benefits StarWind Software’s Log-Structured File System brings unique features and functionality to any primary VM-centric storage system – Significant performance boost and elimination of the hypervisor I/O bottleneck – Support for all RAID parity and striping schemes – Improved functionality for data protection – Flash friendly

Without Further Ado.. Let’s talk to the folks who invented the StarWind Log Structured File System (LSFS) – Get the fine points of the StarWind approach – Explore the way that StarWind LSFS integrates with the hypervisor stack – Learn why it is better to be “complementary” than competitive with the leading hypervisor vendor…

Let’s Talk to StarWind Software Jon Toigo Managing Partner Toigo Partners International Chairman, Data Management Institute Max Kolomyeytsev Product Manager StarWind Software

StarWind Software Background Founded: 2003 Users: 30,000+, including Fortune 500 Headquarters: Wakefield, MA, USA Office Locations: 2 - North America and Europe Channel Partners: 270+ Technology Partners: Microsoft, VMware, HP, IBM, Dell

What Is a Log-Structured File System

Implementing LSFS in Virtual Server Environment slow fast

Implementing LSFS in Virtual Server Environment

Complimentary not Competitive

Any trade offs? Disk space overhead is necessary - 1 TB used is not always 1 TB consumed RAM use is higher - LSFS uses RAM as its clerk to maintain the Log structure Sequential reads can get slower – sequential read is not what it used to be

Q&A Jon Toigo Managing Partner Toigo Partners International Chairman, Data Management Institute Max Kolomyeytsev Product Manager StarWind Software

Thank you. And for more information – – – – – Get StarWind Virtual SAN trial here: – starwind-virtual-san starwind-virtual-san