Jérôme Jaussaud, Senior Product Manager Qtier™ Technology Constant optimization of data across storage tiers. Jérôme Jaussaud, Senior Product Manager

Agenda What is Qtier™ - Auto-tiering Demo environment How easy is to create a storage pool with auto-tiering Quick VDI test environment Quick VDI test results : how many desktops with Qtier ? Some recommendations

Today, without Qtier™ Full of SATA/NL-SAS disk High Capacity SSD SSD SATA SSD SATA Full of SATA/NL-SAS disk High Capacity …but not very fast Full of SSD Very Fast !! …but very Expensive And not that big capacity Both SATA and SSD Very Fast Large Capacity …but it need to separate manually data between both Not convenient

Qtier™ : multi-tier storage Qtier™, is a multi-tier storage management system. Maintain most active data to the high-performance drives 3 Levels of tiered storage Tier 1 : SSD (SAS/SATA) Tier 2 : SAS hard drives Tier 3 : SATA or NL-SAS drives Lighten the burden on administrators Example: Copy one big database (3 TB file as example) in one volume/LUN, Qtier will keep hot blocks on the SSD. Avoid wasting SSD space !

Qtier™ : multi-tier storage Based on access frequency Background & online data movement Scheduled data movement Adjustable optimization options Choose which tier to use first Supports 2 Tiers or 3 Tiers* * Only SAS models support 3 tiers

How easy to create an auto-tiered storage pool! TVS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP with Qtier™ enabled 6x SAS-SSD : SEAGATE 1200.2 SSD 200GB (SAS) - RAID5 9x SATA drives : SEAGATE NAS-HDD 2TB (SATA) - RAID6 Total capacity : 14 TB Client server is a server with Windows 2012 R2, only 8 GB RAM to avoid memory cache-hit  demo real NAS performance, not the cache speed Test software : IOmeter

How easy to create an auto-tiered storage pool! On the TS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP: Create the Qtier storage pool Create an iSCSI LUN On the Windows server: Connect the server to the iSCSI Target / LUN Format the LUN Start the IOmeter test … no tricks! The result is fantastic, seeing is believing!

How easy to create an auto-tiered storage pool! TS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP 6x Seagate SAS-SSD 9x Seagate SATA NAS HDD 4K , 100% random read IO  ~130,000 IOPS with average latency lower than 0.5ms!

Quick VDI test results: How many desktop with Qtier? Test Software : Login VSI to create real workloads using real user behaviors and applications. Virtualization Environment : Cluster of 6 servers with a total of 750 GB RAM and 20 Cores VMware ESXi 6.0 + Horizon View with 200 VMs running Windows 8.1, with applications used in office environments (to read/create doc, xls, pdf, zip...) TS-EC1679U-SAS-RP , QTS 4.2.0 with Qtier™ 8x SEAGATE 1200 SAS-SSD - RAID6 ( SSD Tier – Ultra High Speed ) 4x SEAGATE 15K SAS drives - RAID5 ( SAS Tier – High Speed ) 4x SEAGATE NL-SAS drives - RAID5 ( NL-SAS Tier – Capacity ) Total capacity : 24 TB

Login VSI using QNAP NAS with Qtier After auto-tiering, this VDI test environment can run smoothly up to 195 desktops, with 8 SAS-SSD. 195 VMs

Login VSI using QNAP NAS with Qtier From vSphere Client, we can see that we need more servers to test more VMs. The VMware cluster used for the test reached its maximum capacity.

Qtier or SSD read/write cache? It’s a case by case, depending on the applications workloads... However, as general answer: SSD read/write cache for small configurations. 4~6 SDD read/write cache makes a huge difference. SSD cache requires more memory than Qtier. Qtier for large needs in SSD. SSD read/write cache is more responsive for non predictive scenarios. Qtier needs to wait the next tiering schedule to move hot data to the SSD. Data need to be re-cached after the NAS restart, slowing down the performance between reboots. With Qtier, “hot data” in SSD remains in SSD, even if the NAS is shutdown or rebooted.

https://www.qnap.com/solution/qtier-auto-tiering/en/

Thank You ! https://www.qnap.com/solution/qtier-auto-tiering/en/