1. Matching Storage Spaces Direct Configurations to Your Workload
6/25/ :44 PM
THR2222
Matching Storage Spaces Direct Configurations to Your Workload
Peter Plamondon
Director, Western Digital
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

2. Agenda Workloads and I/O patterns
Storage Spaces Direct configurations and I/O patterns
Lessons Learned
Next Steps

3. Workloads and I/O Patterns
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, etc.
Read-intensive, large block sizes
Source: test pass for Microsoft® SQL Server® Data Warehouse Fast Track validation

4. Workloads and I/O Patterns cont’d
Transactional or HTAP Processing
Write-intensive, small block sizes
Source: SQL Server with HTAP Processing, primarily a transactional workload with some analytics queries
Transactional Workload
Block Size
Block Size (KB)
Reads
% of Reads
65536 64
200444
99.99%
16384 16 6
0.00%
24576 24 5
40960 40 4
32768 32
8192 8
57344 56 2
49152 48

5. Workloads and I/O Patterns cont’d
Mix large reads with small writes and you get: PAIN
Why? Hard drive head movement, added complexity for SSD firmware
High latency = slow requests; Low IOPS = fewer I/O Operations per Second
Lower productivity, fail to meet SLAs
Virtualization and the I/O Blender Effect
Imagine a SQL Server data warehouse workload: large sequential reads
Now virtualize several of these, each in their own VM
At the hypervisor and storage level
The I/O from those VMs gets mixed up – as if it were run through a blender
The storage system gets random I/O, even though it started out as sequential I/O

6. Workloads and I/O Patterns cont’d
Virtualization and the I/O Blender Effect cont’d
Storage performance vs. I/O Blender Effect typically limits virtualized workload density
I.e., limits the number of VMs per host
What does Storage Spaces Direct do to address this?

7. Storage Spaces Direct Configurations
6/25/ :44 PM
Storage Spaces Direct Configurations
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

8. Storage Spaces Direct - Configuration Options
SSD + HDD TM
All-Flash

9. Storage Spaces Direct - Configuration Options cont’d
Rich Product Portfolio = More Choices
HGST offers a variety of HDDs and SSDs, for SAS, SATA, and NVMe
Multiple models with different endurance (DWPD) and capacity points
Hundreds of possible combinations
Which configuration of HDDs and/or SSDs is right for You?
It Depends … on Your Workload

10. Storage Spaces Direct I/O Testing
6/25/ :44 PM
Storage Spaces Direct I/O Testing
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

11. Storage Spaces Direct – I/O Testing
Test System
Goal: a typical enterprise configuration
4 nodes of Lenovo™ x3650 M5, Mellanox ConnectX®-4 100Gb/s
Storage Spaces Direct from Windows Server® 2016 Datacenter Edition
Test Software
Goal: repeatable testing for many different configurations
DiskSpd - running in a Hyper-V VM on each node
4 instances running simultaneously

12. Storage Spaces Direct – I/O Testing cont’d
Test Workload and Data
Goal: comprehensive testing of I/O patterns
Run DiskSpd with ~400 combinations of block size, read/write mix, queue depth, working set size, etc.
Each configuration is tested with several petabytes of I/O
Capture ~1 billions rows of PerfMon counter data

13. What We Learned: All-Flash
6/25/ :44 PM
What We Learned: All-Flash
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

14. All-Flash: NVMe SSD and SAS SSD
NVMe SSD for cache: Ultrastar® SN260 NVMe (AIC)
SAS SSD for capacity: Ultrastar SS200 (12G SAS)
Each Storage Spaces Direct Node:
Cache: 1 Ultrastar SN260 NVMe - 3.2TB
Capacity: 10 Ultrastar SS200 SAS SSD TB
22.4TB per node, 89.6TB across the cluster

15. All-Flash: NVMe SSD and SAS SSD
Good for Virtualized Workloads – Why?
Lots of active data across all the workloads (i.e., large working set)
All reads come directly from the capacity tier SSDs
When capacity tier uses SSDs, read caching is disabled
Each Ultrastar SS200 delivers 250,000 read 100 µs latency1
All writes go to the NVMe SSDs for maximum performance
Write caching is enabled
The Ultrastar SN260 NVMe delivers 200,000 write 20 µs latency2
Storage Spaces Direct consolidates and destages writes to the capacity tier as needed
2 512B random writes
1 4kB random reads

16. All-Flash: NVMe SSD and SAS SSD cont’d
75% of reads come from the local node
98.9% of reads <5 milliseconds1
55.7% <1 millisecond
43.2% <5 milliseconds
Mirroring: 100% of writes handled by the local node
Synchronous replication to other nodes via SMB RDMA
1 Measured over 176k 64kB, 100% random read

17. Other Example Configurations
6/25/ :44 PM
Other Example Configurations
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

18. Example Configuration: Backup and Archive
Write streams of data to the backup storage
NVMe caching tier
Provide fast writes of the data being backed up
Consider high-capacity caching tier, so each backup job can complete without waiting for data to destage to capacity tier
HDD capacity tier
High capacity for read-mostly data
Lowest $/GB for high capacity storage
Data destaged from the caching tier to the capacity tier is written in large sequential blocks

19. Example Configuration: SQL OLTP Consolidation
Lots of Small-Block Random Writes
NVMe caching tier
Fast random writes destined for log file, tempdb, or the database
Or create a separate volume on NVMe drives for log files and tempdb’s
SSD capacity tier
Fast random reads from the database files
Modified data is destaged from cache to the capacity tier as needed
Similar to the Virtualized workloads we just discussed

20. Acknowledgements
Brian Walters, Sr. Technologist Data Propulsion Labs™, Western Digital Corporation
Dan Lovinger Architect, Storage Spaces Direct, Microsoft

21. 6/25/ :44 PM
Next Steps
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

22. Call to Action
Many configurations possible – HGST is testing them
Blog: wdc.li/DataCenterBlog
LinkedIn: SanDisk Data Center Solutions
Visit HGST booth #857 for more information
Windows Server Software-Defined Datacenter
Demo: HPE Scalable Persistent Memory and HGST Ultrastar SS300 SSDs for Storage Spaces Direct:
“What’s new in Windows Server, version 1709 for the software-defined datacenter” (BRK2278), Thursday, 2:15-3:30 PM, OCCC West Hall F2

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6/25/2018
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24. 6/25/ :44 PM
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.