IBM Upgrades SVC with Solid State Drives — Achieves Better Storage Utilization
0 likes292 views
IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC) 5 introduces solid-state drive (SSD) support to enhance storage utilization and simplify management for data centers. The SVC allows integration of multiple storage types, improving flexibility and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 30%. It provides high performance with capabilities like 800,000 read IOPS and multiple cluster mirrors for disaster recovery, making it an attractive solution for enterprises seeking to optimize their storage architecture.
IBM Upgrades SVC with Solid State Drives — Achieves Better Storage Utilization
- 1. IBM Upgrades SVC with Solid State Drives - Achieves Better Storage Utilization THE CLIPPER GROUP Navigator TM SM SM Navigating Information Technology Horizons Published Since 1993 Report #TCG2009046LI October 19, 2009 IBM Upgrades SVC with Solid State Drives — Achieves Better Storage Utilization Analyst: David Reine Management Summary With the football season in full swing, the baseball season heading into the playoffs, and the hockey season just starting, it is time to raid the refrigerator for snacks, head for the most comfortable chair in the family room, and settle in for a full day of viewing sports. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to turn on the myriad number of devices required to watch a game broadcast over cable, on that wide- screen hi-def TV, with the wrap-around sound from the latest audio system available. There is the re- mote for the cable system; there is a remote for the TV; there is one for the satellite dish; there is anoth- er for the sound system. There are so many remote controls on the coffee table that there is hardly room for the snacks! What you need is a universal remote; a single, simplified command center that can control all of the hi-tech equipment in the family room. Unfortunately, even that universal remote will not do the job for any device released after the remote was manufactured. What is required is a universal remote with a learning capability to take the complexity out of turning on the TV, one than can reprogram itself from the remote that comes with every new device. Similar problems confront the data center storage administrator. How can he manage a dozen dif- ferent disk arrays and virtual tape libraries (VTLs) from any number of different vendors, improving storage utilization? How can he manage multiple SANs and multiple NAS arrays without having to learn a dozen different command sets? How can the administrator deploy multiple tiers of storage across these arrays efficiently and economically, to ensure that the storage is being properly utilized? How can the administrator ensure that the HPC application is assigned to the highest performing (and most expensive) solid-state disk device (SSD), while mission-critical applications write to the fastest Fibre Channel (FC) devices, and the backup application to the highest capacity (and lowest cost) SATA disk? When confronted with similar issues, the server administrator has resorted to the consolidation and virtualization of under-utilized platforms. The solution is the same for the storage administrator. Virtualization of the storage architecture can ensure that the data center gets the maximum value out of its storage resources, maintaining the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO) of the enterprise storage infrastructure. By deploying a storage virtualization appliance, the IT staff can achieve the highest possible utilization of its storage capacity, while simplifying management control. It can manage FC and iSCSI from the one GUI. It can deploy SSDs for those applications that demand the highest possible IOPS, while assigning the most reliable HDDs to those mission-critical ap- plications that require them, and the least expen- sive devices to archive applications. The question IN THIS ISSUE that remains: Which virtualization engine to de- ploy? To date, the most successful storage vir- Storage Utilization in the Data Center .. 2 tualization system has been IBM’s SAN Volume IBM’s SAN Volume Controller 5 ............ 3 Controller (SVC). Is it the right engine for your enterprise? To find out, please read on. Conclusion .............................................. 4 The Clipper Group, Inc. - Technology Acquisition Consultants Strategic Advisors 888 Worcester Street Suite 140 Wellesley, Massachusetts 02482 U.S.A. 781-235-0085 781-235-5454 FAX Visit Clipper at www.clipper.com Send comments to editor@clipper.com
- 2. The Clipper Group Navigator TM October 19, 2009 Page 2 Storage Utilization in the Data Center Exhibit 1 – SSD Functionality The typical data center is in the midst of NAND Flash is a special form of flash radical change, consolidating under-utilized ser- memory that can be electrically erased and ver sprawl onto fewer, more efficient multi-core reprogrammed. Flash memory is a memory platforms, which have been virtualized to im- technology that keeps data even when the prove processor utilization, simplify server ad- power supply is cut off. This is known as ministration, and lower the TCO of the data non-volatile memory. Flash memory costs center. This lower cost encompasses more ef- far less than byte-programmable EEPROM ficient energy consumption and better utiliza- and therefore has become the dominant tion of floor space, enabling the enterprise to technology wherever a significant amount of conserve natural resources and prolong the life- SSD storage is needed. cycle of the existing data center facilities. A- long the way, these faster, multi-socket, multi- Flash memory does not have the mech- core platforms improve application performance anical limitations and latencies of hard and raise service levels, enabling the enterprise drives, so the idea of solid state storage is to react faster to changing business conditions. attractive when there is a requirement for However, it has done nothing to improve the very high IOPS speed and very low power utilization of storage resources and it also has consumption. Flash memory offers very fast resulted in a significant increase in the com- read access times. In order to counteract a plexity of the storage architecture, with po- limited number of write-cycles, manufac- tential performance penalties for every I/O turers have implemented a number of wear- issued. As the number of virtual machines on leveling techniques to prolong SSD life. any given server increases, the ability of the I/O Manufacturers typically specify something subsystem to predict the next read or write be- in the area of 100,000 write-erase cycles per comes increasingly difficult. block, for the lifetime of the device. With a dual-socket, quad-core server, the IT staff can consolidate 10, 20, or more, appli- formance of every application moved to a vir- cations on a single platform. Unfortunately, this tualized server environment. does not improve the utilization of storage In order to reverse this negative trend in I/O within the data center. Similarly to the server performance, the IT staff must change the data farm, disk devices on the SAN are seriously access paradigm in the data center, moving to under-utilized, with space being reserved for an automated, virtualized storage environment, future use which may or may not ever be util- with multiple tiers of storage available to assign ized. The data center is only using about 30% applications to disk space with the most appro- of the typical disk drive, with the remainder priate value for the enterprise. The data center sitting idle. Improvements must be made in the needs to improve storage utilization, the perfor- provisioning of disk storage which has rapidly mance of an increasingly random I/O engine, become, along with application software, the and also lower the TCO of the storage environ- biggest drain on the enterprise IT budget. ment in the same vein as the server network. Server virtualization has also changed the In order to eliminate storage sprawl, the fundamental nature of I/O generation, as each data center must unify their existing storage, virtual machine, every application, can issue an virtualizing the front end with a common in- I/O request to the same I/O controller, mini- terface to more fully utilize existing arrays. mizing the ability of the controller to predict They need the capability to manage multiple what the next I/O might be. In essence this tiers of storage, including high-performance makes every I/O random, even for applications Tier-1 FC drives for mission-critical applica- which might be issuing sequential I/Os in a non- tions, high-capacity, low-cost Tier-2 SATA virtualized environment. This limits the capa- drives for business-critical and archiving ap- bility of the controller to do a prefetch, bundle plications, and, most importantly, the premium writes, or even utilize a read cache. In effect, Tier-0 Flash SSDs for those applications with the data center loses all of the performance the highest IOPS requirements (See Exhibit 1, gains achieved over the past few years in the above). They must have the ability to assign area of predictive analysis, affecting the per- applications dynamically to the devices that can Copyright © 2009 by The Clipper Group, Inc. Reproduction prohibited without advance written permission. All rights reserved.
- 3. The Clipper Group Navigator TM October 19, 2009 Page 3 deliver the right amount of value through per- IBM and non-IBM arrays. The SVC enables formance and capacity to meet the service levels the data center to combine storage capacity agreed to with the data center’s users. The IT from multiple, heterogeneous disk systems into staff needs an environment that can reduce the a single pool of storage, increasing flexibility complexity of storage management with the while reducing the complexity of storage man- flexibility that will enable the data center to agement. Improved remote mirror function- adapt to a changing business climate. ality, through VMware vCenter Site Recovery Using their technological leadership in the Manager with Metro Mirror and Global Mir- data center, IBM developed the SAN Volume ror, provides the enterprise with a single, con- Controller (SVC) to meet these requirements. solidated data center for a simplified, multi-site By virtualizing the front-end of the SAN, the disaster recovery capability. data center can improve the utilization and per- The SVC enables the data center to share formance of their existing storage platforms, re- multiple tiers of storage between multiple ser- gardless of the vendor source. The SVC has vers, physical or virtual. Moreover, with Ver- been delivering the reliability and the tools ne- sion 5 of the SVC, IBM becomes the first ven- cessary to create just the right balance of per- dor to deliver fully integrated support for solid- formance and capacity to enable the data center state drives, from one to four 146GB drives per to reduce their TCO for the storage infrastruc- SVC engine, to improve performance and ener- ture while improving operating efficiency. In gy efficiency. IBM has enabled virtual disk fact, IBM has reported better than five “9s” re- mirroring to protect against SSD or storage liability across the entire SVC installed base. engine failure, with up to 584GBs of mirrored Last year, IBM introduced a new entry-lev- capacity per I/O group, or up to 2.4TBs per el version of the SVC for the SMB and depart- cluster. Replication, data movement, and man- mental customers, simplifying configuration agement operate identically as they would on and pricing, and enhancing it with thin provi- HDDs. Furthermore, the IT staff can move data sioning and snapshots, enabling these functions to and from SSDs without disruption, including on storage platforms that did not come with making copies of SSD data on HDD drives, these advanced capabilities. SVC also supports preserving these more valuable assets for high a wide variety of server virtualization hypervi- IOPS activities. IBM’s Tivoli Storage Pro- sors, including the most popular open products, ductivity Center Performance Optimizer can be VMware, Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen, as well as used to help identify the data that is the highest IBM’s own PowerVM and zLPAR. This is ex- candidate for SSD storage. This enables scale- tremely valuable for any data center with a out ultra-high throughput and response time for mixed server virtualization environment looking hard-to-tune I/O intensive workloads, with up to for quick provisioning and scalability. SVC 50,000 read IOPS per SSD, up to 200,000 per facilitates load balancing across a heterogen- SVC I/O group, and up to 800,000 read IOPS eous mix of storage arrays behind it. In fact, per SVC cluster. IBM has been so successful with the SVC that Along with Version 5 of the SVC software, in 2008 they shipped their 15,000th SVC engine. IBM is introducing a new high end engine for However, technology does not stand still; increased performance, based upon the IBM and, apparently, neither does IBM! IBM has quad-core System x3550M2 server. Configured now announced added capabilities for SVC 5 to with 24GB of cache, three times the previous include innovative support for SSDs along with model, and with four 8Gbps FC ports, SVC 5 a new Version 5 of the SVC software. In an era improves bandwidth by up to two times the where server virtualization has changed the way previous version. SVC 5 also supports iSCSI, servers interface with storage, the SVC is for lower cost server attachment to all SVC- changing its role in the data center, also. supported disk systems. This new engine can be intermixed with older engines in an SVC IBM’s SAN Volume Controller 5 cluster and provides support for multiple remote IBM’s SVC is a storage virtualization sys- mirror locations with increased remote mirror tem designed to help customers improve storage capacity. utilization, control storage growth, and reduce This innovation and configurability enables their TCO for SAN storage by up to 30%, for a significant improvement in SVC’s price/per- Copyright © 2009 by The Clipper Group, Inc. Reproduction prohibited without advance written permission. All rights reserved.
- 4. The Clipper Group Navigator TM October 19, 2009 Page 4 formance ratio. It also enables support for more been seeking to con- demanding, larger configurations, with fewer solidate and virtual- SVC engines. With an eight-node configurat- ize storage opera- ion, IBM estimates that SVC 5.0 will return a tions, improve per- projected SPC-1 benchmark rating 65% higher formance, and reduce than the current SVC engine, with a projected the budget drain by rating that is more than double the posted to the costs associ- benchmark from HDS. ated with rapidly ex- SVC Software Version 5 is available as a panding data. SM non-disruptive upgrade for all existing custo- mers with a current subscription, providing software support for the following. • iSCSI server attachment, with two 1Gbps Ethernet ports per engine; • Replication enhancements via Metro Mirror and Global Mirror to enable the data center to copy from several remote sites to a single SVC cluster at a disaster recovery site; • Copy services for Multi-Target Reverse FlashCopy to enable FlashCopy targets to become restore points for the source; and • Improved cache management, improving throughput by up to 15%. SVC 5.0 supports all SVC engines available since 2005. Conclusion With the availability of solid-state storage within Version 5 of its SAN Volume Controller, IBM once again delivers outstanding tech- nological innovation to the data center. SVC 5 provides the IT staff with multiple tiers of stor- age, topped by the 800,000 read IOPS capa- bility of an integrated SSD capability. This functionality does come with a higher cost, but it also delivers significantly higher value as demonstrated by the increased performance from industry standard benchmarks, making its ROI very attractive to the enterprise. Additional functionality, such as iSCSI connections for added flexibility to attach low- cost servers, and FlashCopy Manager to help reduce backup windows provide even more value to the data center. Furthermore, the new Multiple Cluster Mirror functionality to support consolidated disaster recovery helps to simplify data center management at a lower cost. If you have a heterogeneous storage archi- tecture in your data center that is under-utilized and costing the enterprise on the bottom line, IBM SVC 5 may be the solution that you have Copyright © 2009 by The Clipper Group, Inc. Reproduction prohibited without advance written permission. All rights reserved.
- 5. The Clipper Group Navigator TM October 19, 2009 Page 5 About The Clipper Group, Inc. The Clipper Group, Inc., is an independent consulting firm specializing in acquisition decisions and strategic advice regarding complex, enterprise-class information tech- nologies. Our team of industry professionals averages more than 25 years of real-world experience. A team of staff consultants augments our capabilities, with significant experience across a broad spectrum of applications and environments. The Clipper Group can be reached at 781-235-0085 and found on the web at www.clipper.com. About the Author David Reine is Director, Enterprise Systems for The Clipper Group. Mr. Reine specializes in enterprise servers, storage, and software, strategic business solutions, and trends in open systems architectures. He joined The Clipper Group after three decades in server and storage product marketing and program management for Groupe Bull, Zenith Data Systems, and Honeywell Information Systems. Mr. Reine earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Tufts University, and an MBA from Northeastern University. Reach David Reine via e-mail at dave.reine@clipper.com or at 781-235-0085 Ext. 123. (Please dial “123” when you hear the automated attendant.) Regarding Trademarks and Service Marks The Clipper Group Navigator, The Clipper Group Explorer, The Clipper Group Observer, The Clipper Group Captain’s Log, The Clipper Group Voyager, Clipper Notes, and “clipper.com” are trademarks of The Clipper Group, Inc., and the clipper ship drawings, “Navigating Information Technology Horizons”, and “teraproductivity” are service marks of The Clipper Group, Inc. The Clipper Group, Inc., reserves all rights regarding its trademarks and service marks. All other trademarks, etc., belong to their respective owners. Disclosure Officers and/or employees of The Clipper Group may own as individuals, directly or indirectly, shares in one or more companies discussed in this bulletin. Company policy prohibits any officer or employee from holding more than one percent of the outstanding shares of any company covered by The Clipper Group. The Clipper Group, Inc., has no such equity holdings. Regarding the Information in this Issue The Clipper Group believes the information included in this report to be accurate. Data has been received from a variety of sources, which we believe to be reliable, including manufacturers, distributors, or users of the products discussed herein. The Clipper Group, Inc., cannot be held responsible for any consequential damages resulting from the application of information or opinions contained in this report. Copyright © 2009 by The Clipper Group, Inc. Reproduction prohibited without advance written permission. All rights reserved.