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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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 !

5. 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

6. How easy to create an auto-tiered storage pool!
TVS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP
with Qtier™ enabled
6x SAS-SSD : SEAGATE 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

7. 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!

8. 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!

9. 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 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 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

10. 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

11. 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.

12. 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.

14. Thank You !