Category: big data

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VMware announces vSphere V6 and associated virtualization technologies

VMware announces vSphere V6 and associated virtualization technologies

server storage I/O trends

VMware has announced version 6 (V6) of its software defined data center (SDDC) server virtualization hypervisor called vSphere aka ESXi. In addition to a new version of its software defined server hypervisor along with companion software defined management and convergence tools.

VMware

VMware vSphere Refresh

As a refresh for those whose world does not revolve around VMware, vSphere and software defined data centers (believe it or not there are some who exist ;), ESXi is the hypervisor that virtualizes underlying physical machines (PM’s) known as hosts.

software defined data center convergence
The path to software defined data center convergence

Guest operating systems (or other hypervisors using nesting) run as virtual machines (VM’s) on top of the vSphere hypervisor host (e.g. ESXi software). Various VMware management tools (or third-party) are used for managing the virtualized data center from initial configuration, configuration, conversion from physical to virtual (P2V) or virtual to virtual (V2V) along with data protection, performance, capacity planning across servers, storage and networks.

virtual machines

VMware vSphere is flexible and can adapt to different sized environments from small office home office (SOHO) or small SMB, to large SMB, SME, enterprise or cloud service provider. There are a free version of ESXi along with paid versions that include support and added management tool features. Besides the ESXi vSphere hypervisor, other commonly deployed modules include the vCenter administration along with Infrastructure Controller services platform among others. In addition, there are optional solution bundles to add support for virtual networking, cloud (public and private), data protection (backup/restore, replication, HA, BC, DR), big data among other capabilities.

What is new with vSphere V6

VMware has streamlined the installation, configuration and deployment of vSphere along with associated tools which for smaller environments makes things simply easier. For the larger environments, having to do less means being able to do more in the same amount of time which results in cost savings. In addition to easier to use, deploy and configure, VMware has extended the scaling capabilities of vSphere in terms of scaling-out (larger clusters), scaling-up (more and larger servers), as well as scaling-down (smaller environments and ease of use).

cloud virtual software defined servers

  • Compute: Expanded support for new hardware, guest operating systems and general scalability in terms of physical, and virtual resources. For example increasing the number of virtual CPU (vCPUs), number of cluster nodes among other speeds and feeds enhancements.

server storage I/O vsan

  • Storage: This is an area where several enhancements were made including updates for Storage I/O controls (Storage QoS and performance optimizations) with per VM reservations, NFS v4.1 with Kerberos client, Virtual SAN (VSAN) improvements (new back-end underlying file system) as well as new Virtual Volumes (vVOLs) for Storage Policy Based Management.
  • Availability: Improvements for vMotion (ability to live move virtual machines between physical servers (vmware hosts) including long distance fault-tolerance. Other improvements include faster replication, vMotion across vCenter servers, and long distance vMotion (up to 100ms round trip time latency).
  • Network: Network I/O Control (NIOC) provides per VM and dat (VM and data repository) bandwidth reservations for quality of service (QoS) performance optimization.
  • Management: Improvements for multi-site, virtual data centers, content-library (storage and versioning of files and objects including ISOs and OVFs (Open Virtualization Format files) that can be on a VMFS (VMware File System) dat or NFS volume, policy-based management and web-client performance enhancements.

What is vVOL?

The quick synopsis of VMware vVOL’s overview:

  • Higher level of abstraction of storage vs. traditional SCSI LUN’s or NAS NFS mount points
  • Tighter level of integration and awareness between VMware hypervisors and storage systems
  • Simplified management for storage and virtualization administrators
  • Removing complexity to support increased scaling
  • Enable automation and service managed storage aka software defined storage management

server storage I/O volumes
How data storage access and managed via VMware today (read more here)

vVOL’s are not LUN’s like regular block (e.g. DAS or SAN) storage that use SAS, iSCSI, FC, FCoE, IBA/SRP, nor are they NAS volumes like NFS mount points. Likewise vVOL’s are not accessed using any of the various object storage access methods mentioned above (e.g. AWS S3, Rest, CDMI, etc) instead they are an application specific implementation. For some of you this approach of an applications specific or unique storage access method may be new, perhaps revolutionary, otoh, some of you might be having a DejaVu moment right about now.

vVOL is not a LUN in the context of what you may know and like (or hate, even if you have never worked with them), likewise it is not a NAS volume like you know (or have heard of), neither are they objects in the context of what you might have seen or heard such as S3 among others.

Keep in mind that what makes up a VMware virtual machine are the VMK, VMDK and some other files (shown in the figure below), and if enough information is known about where those blocks of data are or can be found, they can be worked upon. Also keep in mind that at least near-term, block is the lowest common denominator that all file systems and object repositories get built-up.

server storage I/O vVOL basics
How VMware data storage accessed and managed with vVOLs (read more here)

Here is the thing, while vVOL’s will be accessible via a block interface such as iSCSI, FC or FCoE or for that matter, over Ethernet based IP using NFS. Think of these storage interfaces and access mechanisms as the general transport for how vSphere ESXi will communicate with the storage system (e.g. their data path) under vCenter management.

What is happening inside the storage system that will be presented back to ESXi will be different than a normal SCSI LUN contents and only understood by VMware hypervisor. ESXi will still tell the storage system what it wants to do including moving blocks of data. The storage system however will have more insight and awareness into the context of what those blocks of data mean. This is how the storage systems will be able to more closely integrate snapshots, replication, cloning and other functions by having awareness into which data to move, as opposed to moving or working with an entire LUN where a VMDK may live.

Keep in mind that the storage system will still function as it normally would, just think of vVOL as another or new personality and access mechanism used for VMware to communicate and manage storage. Watch for vVOL storage provider support from the who’s who of existing and startup storage system providers including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, Nimble and many others. Read more about Storage I/O fundamentals here and vVOLs here and here.

What this announcement means

Depending on your experiences, you might use revolutionary to describe some of the VMware vSphere V6 features and functionalities. Otoh, if you have some Dejavu moments looking pragmatically at what VMware is delivering with V6 of vSphere executing on their vision, evolutionary might be more applicable. I will leave it up to you do decide if you are having a Dejavu moment and what that might pertain to, or if this is all new and revolutionary, or something more along the lines of technolutionary.

VMware continues to execute delivering on the Virtual Data Center aka Software Defined Data Center paradigm by increasing functionality, as well as enhancing existing capabilities with performance along with resiliency improvements. These abilities enable the aggregation of compute, storage, networking, management and policies for enabling a global virtual data center while supporting existing along with new emerging applications.

Where to learn more

If you were not part of the beta to gain early hands-on experience with VMware vSphere V6 and associated technologies, download a copy to check it out as part of making your upgrade or migration plans.

Check out the various VMware resources including communities links here
VMware vSphere Hypervisor getting started and general vSphere information (including download)
VMware vSphere data sheet, compatibility guide along with speeds and feeds (size and other limits)
VMware vExpert
VMware Blogs and VMware vExpert page

Various fellow VMware vExpert blogs including among many others vsphere-land, scott lowe, virtuallyghetto and yellow-bricks among many others found at the vpad here.

StorageIO Out and About Update – VMworld 2014 (with Video)
VMware vVOL’s and storage I/O fundamentals (Storage I/O overview and vVOL, details Part I and Part II)
How many IOPs can a HDD or SSD do in a VMware environment (Part I and Part II)
VMware VSAN overview and primer, DIY converged software defined storage on a budget

Wrap up and summary

Overall VMware vSphere V6 has a great set of features that support both ease of management for small environments as well as the scaling needs of larger organizations.

Ok, nuff said, for now…

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking 101 for Smarties

Server Storage I/O Benchmarking 101 for Smarties or dummies ;)

server storage I/O trends

This is the first of a series of posts and links to resources on server storage I/O performance and benchmarking (view more and follow-up posts here).

The best I/O is the I/O that you do not have to do, the second best is the one with the least impact as well as low overhead.

server storage I/O performance

Drew Robb (@robbdrew) has a Data Storage Benchmarking Guide article over at Enterprise Storage Forum that provides a good framework and summary quick guide to server storage I/O benchmarking.

Via Drew:

Data storage benchmarking can be quite esoteric in that vast complexity awaits anyone attempting to get to the heart of a particular benchmark.

Case in point: The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has developed the Emerald benchmark to measure power consumption. This invaluable benchmark has a vast amount of supporting literature. That so much could be written about one benchmark test tells you just how technical a subject this is. And in SNIA’s defense, it is creating a Quick Reference Guide for Emerald (coming soon).

But rather than getting into the nitty-gritty nuances of the tests, the purpose of this article is to provide a high-level overview of a few basic storage benchmarks, what value they might have and where you can find out more. 

Read more here including some of my comments, tips and recommendations.

Drew’s provides a good summary and overview in his article which is a great opener for this first post in a series on server storage I/O benchmarking and related resources.

You can think of this series (along with Drew’s article) as server storage I/O benchmarking fundamentals (e.g. 101) for smarties (e.g. non-dummies ;) ).

Note that even if you are not a server, storage or I/O expert, you can still be considered a smarty vs. a dummy if you found the need or interest to read as well as learn more about benchmarking, metrics that matter, tools, technology and related topics.

Server and Storage I/O benchmarking 101

There are different reasons for benchmarking, such as, you might be asked or want to know how many IOPs per disk, Solid State Device (SSD), device or storage system such as for a 15K RPM (revolutions per minute) 146GB SAS Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Sure you can go to a manufactures website and look at the speeds and feeds (technical performance numbers) however are those metrics applicable to your environments applications or workload?

You might get higher IOPs with smaller IO size on sequential reads vs. random writes which will also depend on what the HDD is attached to. For example are you going to attach the HDD to a storage system or appliance with RAID and caching? Are you going to attach the HDD to a PCIe RAID card or will it be part of a server or storage system. Or are you simply going to put the HDD into a server or workstation and use as a drive without any RAID or performance acceleration.

What this all means is understanding what it is that you want to benchmark test to learn what the system, solution, service or specific device can do under different workload conditions.

Some benchmark and related topics include

  • What are you trying to benchmark
  • Why do you need to benchmark something
  • What are some server storage I/O benchmark tools
  • What is the best benchmark tool
  • What to benchmark, how to use tools
  • What are the metrics that matter
  • What is benchmark context why does it matter
  • What are marketing hero benchmark results
  • What to do with your benchmark results

    • server storage I/O benchmark step test
    Example of a step test results with various workers and workload

  • What do the various metrics mean (can we get a side of context with them metrics?)
  • Why look at server CPU if doing storage and I/O networking tests
  • Where and how to profile your application workloads
  • What about physical vs. virtual vs. cloud and software defined benchmarking
  • How to benchmark block DAS or SAN, file NAS, object, cloud, databases and other things
  • Avoiding common benchmark mistakes
  • Tips, recommendations, things to watch out for
  • What to do next

server storage I/O trends

Where to learn more

The following are related links to read more about server (cloud, virtual and physical) storage I/O benchmarking tools, technologies and techniques.

Drew Robb’s benchmarking quick reference guide
Server storage I/O benchmarking tools, technologies and techniques resource page
Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking 101 for Smarties.
Microsoft Diskspd download and Microsoft Diskspd overview (via Technet)
I/O, I/O how well do you know about good or bad server and storage I/Os?
Server and Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I and Part II)

Wrap up and summary

We have just scratched the surface when it comes to benchmarking cloud, virtual and physical server storage I/O and networking hardware, software along with associated tools, techniques and technologies. However hopefully this and the links for more reading mentioned above give a basis for connecting the dots of what you already know or enable learning more about workloads, synthetic generation and real-world workloads, benchmarks and associated topics. Needless to say there are many more things that we will cover in future posts (e.g. keep an eye on and bookmark the server storage I/O benchmark tools and resources page here).

Ok, nuff said, for now…

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Server Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I)

Server Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I)

server storage I/O trends

This is part-one of a two-part post pertaining Microsoft Diskspd.that is also part of a broader series focused on server storage I/O benchmarking, performance, capacity planning, tools and related technologies. You can view part-two of this post here, along with companion links here.

Background

Many people use Iometer for creating synthetic (artificial) workloads to support benchmarking for testing, validation and other activities. While Iometer with its GUI is relatively easy to use and available across many operating system (OS) environments, the tool also has its limits. One of the bigger limits for Iometer is that it has become dated with little to no new development for a long time, while other tools including some new ones continue to evolve in functionality, along with extensibility. Some of these tools have optional GUI for easy of use or configuration, while others simple have extensive scripting and command parameter capabilities. Many tools are supported across different OS including physical, virtual and cloud, while others such as Microsoft Diskspd are OS specific.

Instead of focusing on Iometer and other tools as well as benchmarking techniques (we cover those elsewhere), lets focus on Microsoft Diskspd.


server storage I/O performance

What is Microsoft Diskspd?

Microsoft Diskspd is a synthetic workload generation (e.g. benchmark) tool that runs on various Windows systems as an alternative to Iometer, vdbench, iozone, iorate, fio, sqlio among other tools. Diskspd is a command line tool which means it can easily be scripted to do reads and writes of various I/O size including random as well as sequential activity. Server and storage I/O can be buffered file system as well non-buffered across different types of storage and interfaces. Various performance and CPU usage information is provided to gauge the impact on a system when doing a given number of IOP’s, amount of bandwidth along with response time latency.

What can Diskspd do?

Microsoft Diskspd creates synthetic benchmark workload activity with ability to define various options to simulate different application characteristics. This includes specifying read and writes, random, sequential, IO size along with number of threads to simulate concurrent activity. Diskspd can be used for testing or validating server and storage I/O systems along with associated software, tools and components. In addition to being able to specify different workloads, Diskspd can also be told which processors to use (e.g. CPU affinity), buffering or non-buffered IO among other things.

What type of storage does Diskspd work with?

Physical and virtual storage including hard disk drive (HDD), solid state devices (SSD), solid state hybrid drives (SSHD) in various systems or solutions. Storage can be physical as well as partitions or file systems. As with any workload tool when doing writes, exercise caution to prevent accidental deletion or destruction of your data.


What information does Diskspd produce?

Diskspd provides output in text as well as XML formats. See an example of Diskspd output further down in this post.

Where to get Diskspd?

You can download your free copy of Diskspd from the Microsoft site here.

The download and installation are quick and easy, just remember to select the proper version for your Windows system and type of processor.

Another tip is to remember to set path environment variables point to where you put the Diskspd image.

Also stating what should be obvious, don’t forget that if you are going to be doing any benchmark or workload generation activity on a system where the potential for a data to be over-written or deleted, make sure you have a good backup and tested restore before you begin, if something goes wrong.


New to server storage I/O benchmarking or tools?

If you are not familiar with server storage I/O performance benchmarking or using various workload generation tools (e.g. benchmark tools), Drew Robb (@robbdrew) has a Data Storage Benchmarking Guide article over at Enterprise Storage Forum that provides a good framework and summary quick guide to server storage I/O benchmarking.




Via Drew:

Data storage benchmarking can be quite esoteric in that vast complexity awaits anyone attempting to get to the heart of a particular benchmark.

Case in point: The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has developed the Emerald benchmark to measure power consumption. This invaluable benchmark has a vast amount of supporting literature. That so much could be written about one benchmark test tells you just how technical a subject this is. And in SNIA’s defense, it is creating a Quick Reference Guide for Emerald (coming soon).


But rather than getting into the nitty-gritty nuances of the tests, the purpose of this article is to provide a high-level overview of a few basic storage benchmarks, what value they might have and where you can find out more. 

Read more here including some of my comments, tips and recommendations.


In addition to Drew’s benchmarking quick reference guide, along with the server storage I/O benchmarking tools, technologies and techniques resource page (Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking 101 for Smarties.

How do you use Diskspd?


Tip: When you run Microsoft Diskspd it will create a file or data set on the device or volume being tested that it will do its I/O to, make sure that you have enough disk space for what will be tested (e.g. if you are going to test 1TB you need to have more than 1TB of disk space free for use). Another tip is to speed up the initializing (e.g. when Diskspd creates the file that I/Os will be done to) run as administrator.

Tip: In case you forgot, a couple of other useful Microsoft tools (besides Perfmon) for working with and displaying server storage I/O devices including disks (HDD and SSDs) are the commands "wmic diskdrive list [brief]" and "diskpart". With diskpart exercise caution as it can get you in trouble just as fast as it can get you out of trouble.

You can view the Diskspd commands after installing the tool and from a Windows command prompt type:

C:\Users\Username> Diskspd


The above command will display Diskspd help and information about the commands as follows.

Usage: diskspd [options] target1 [ target2 [ target3 …] ]

version 2.0.12 (2014/09/17)


Available targets:

       file_path

       #
       :


Available options:











-?display usage information
-a#[,#[…]]advanced CPU affinity – affinitize threads to CPUs provided after -a in a round-robin manner within current KGroup (CPU count starts with 0); the same CPU can be listed more than once and the number of CPUs can be different than the number of files or threads (cannot be used with -n)

-ag

group affinity – affinitize threads in a round-robin manner across KGroups
-b[K|M|G]block size in bytes/KB/MB/GB [default=64K]

-B[K|M|G|b]

base file offset in bytes/KB/MB/GB/blocks [default=0] (offset from the beginning of the file)
-c[K|M|G|b]create files of the given size. Size can be stated in bytes/KB/MB/GB/blocks

-Ccool down time – duration of the test after measurements finished [default=0s].

-DPrint IOPS standard deviations. The deviations are calculated for samples of duration . is given in milliseconds and the default value is 1000.
-dduration (in seconds) to run test [default=10s]
-f[K|M|G|b]

file size – this parameter can be used to use only the part of the file/disk/partition for example to test only the first sectors of disk
-fropen file with the FILE_FLAG_RANDOM_ACCESS hint
-fsopen file with the FILE_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN hint
-Ftotal number of threads (cannot be used with -t)
-gthroughput per thread is throttled to given bytes per millisecond note that this can not be specified when using completion routines
-hdisable both software and hardware caching
-inumber of IOs (burst size) before thinking. must be specified with -j
-jtime to think in ms before issuing a burst of IOs (burst size). must be specified with -i
-ISet IO priority to . Available values are: 1-very low, 2-low, 3-normal (default)
-lUse large pages for IO buffers

-Lmeasure latency statistics
-ndisable affinity (cannot be used with -a)
-onumber of overlapped I/O requests per file per thread (1=synchronous I/O, unless more than 1 thread is specified with -F) [default=2]
-pstart async (overlapped) I/O operations with the same offset (makes sense only with -o2 or grater)
-Penable printing a progress dot after each completed I/O operations (counted separately by each thread) [default count=65536]
-r[K|M|G|b]random I/O aligned to bytes (doesn’t make sense with -s). can be stated in bytes/KB/MB/GB/blocks [default access=sequential, default alignment=block size]
-R

output format. Default is text.
-s[K|M|G|b]stride size (offset between starting positions of subsequent I/O operations)
-Sdisable OS caching
-tnumber of threads per file (cannot be used with -F)
-T[K|M|G|b]stride between I/O operations performed on the same file by different threads [default=0] (starting offset = base file offset + (thread number * ) it makes sense only with -t or -F
-vverbose mode
-wpercentage of write requests (-w and -w0 are equivalent). absence of this switch indicates 100% reads IMPORTANT: Your data will be destroyed without a warning
-W

warm up time – duration of the test before measurements start [default=5s].
-xuse completion routines instead of I/O Completion Ports
-Xuse an XML file for configuring the workload. Cannot be used with other parameters.
-zset random seed [default=0 if parameter not provided, GetTickCount() if value not provided]




 
Write buffers command options. By default, the write buffers are filled with a repeating pattern (0, 1, 2, …, 255, 0, 1, …)
-Z

zero buffers used for write tests
-Z[K|M|G|b]use a global buffer filled with random data as a source for write operations.
-Z[K|M|G|b],

use a global buffer filled with data from as a source for write operations. If is smaller than , its content will be repeated multiple times in the buffer. By default, the write buffers are filled with a repeating pattern (0, 1, 2, …, 255, 0, 1, …)







 Synchronization command options
-ys
signals event
before starting the actual run (no warmup) (creates a notification event if does not exist)
-yfsignals event after the actual run finishes (no cooldown) (creates a notification event if does not exist)
-yrwaits on event before starting the run (including warmup) (creates a notification event if does not exist)
-ypallows to stop the run when event is set; it also binds CTRL+C to this event (creates a notification event if does not exist)
-yesets event and quits









Event Tracing command options

-epuse paged memory for NT Kernel Logger (by default it uses non-paged memory)
-equse perf timer
-esuse system timer (default)
-ecuse cycle count
-ePROCESSprocess start & end
-eTHREADthread start & end
-eIMAGE_LOADimage load
-eDISK_IOphysical disk IO
-eMEMORY_PAGE_FAULTSall page faults
-eMEMORY_HARD_FAULTShard faults only
-eNETWORK

TCP/IP, UDP/IP send & receive
-eREGISTRYregistry calls




Examples:


Create 8192KB file and run read test on it for 1 second:


  diskspd -c8192K -d1 testfile.dat


Set block size to 4KB, create 2 threads per file, 32 overlapped (outstanding)

I/O operations per thread, disable all caching mechanisms and run block-aligned random

access read test lasting 10 seconds:


  diskspd -b4K -t2 -r -o32 -d10 -h testfile.dat


Create two 1GB files, set block size to 4KB, create 2 threads per file, affinitize threads

to CPUs 0 and 1 (each file will have threads affinitized to both CPUs) and run read test

lasting 10 seconds:


  diskspd -c1G -b4K -t2 -d10 -a0,1 testfile1.dat testfile2.dat

Where to learn more


The following are related links to read more about servver (cloud, virtual and physical) storage I/O benchmarking tools, technologies and techniques.
resource page

Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking 101 for Smarties.

Microsoft Diskspd download and Microsoft Diskspd overview (via Technet)

I/O, I/O how well do you know about good or bad server and storage I/Os?

Server and Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I and Part II)

Wrap up and summary, for now…


This wraps up part-one of this two-part post taking a look at Microsoft Diskspd benchmark and workload generation tool. In part-two (here) of this post series we take a closer look including a test drive using Microsoft Diskspd.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)

twitter @storageio


All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Microsoft Diskspd (Part II): Server Storage I/O Benchmark Tools

Microsoft Diskspd (Part II): Server Storage I/O Benchmark Tools

server storage I/O trends

This is part-two of a two-part post pertaining Microsoft Diskspd.that is also part of a broader series focused on server storage I/O benchmarking, performance, capacity planning, tools and related technologies. You can view part-one of this post here, along with companion links here.

Microsoft Diskspd StorageIO lab test drive

Server and StorageIO lab

Talking about tools and technologies is one thing, installing as well as trying them is the next step for gaining experience so how about some quick hands-on time with Microsoft Diskspd (download your copy here).

The following commands all specify an I/O size of 8Kbytes doing I/O to a 45GByte file called diskspd.dat located on the F: drive. Note that a 45GByte file is on the small size for general performance testing, however it was used for simplicity in this example. Ideally a larger target storage area (file, partition, device) would be used, otoh, if your application uses a small storage device or volume, then tune accordingly.

In this test, the F: drive is an iSCSI RAID protected volume, however you could use other storage interfaces supported by Windows including other block DAS or SAN (e.g. SATA, SAS, USB, iSCSI, FC, FCoE, etc) as well as NAS. Also common to the following commands is using 16 threads and 32 outstanding I/Os to simulate concurrent activity of many users, or application processing threads.
server storage I/O performance
Another common parameter used in the following was -r for random, 7200 seconds (e.g. two hour) test duration time, display latency ( -L ) disable hardware and software cache ( -h), forcing cpu affinity (-a0,1,2,3). Since the test ran on a server with four cores I wanted to see if I could use those for helping to keep the threads and storage busy. What varies in the commands below is the percentage of reads vs. writes, as well as the results output file. Some of the workload below also had the -S option specified to disable OS I/O buffering (to view how buffering helps when enabled or disabled). Depending on the goal, or type of test, validation, or workload being run, I would choose to set some of these parameters differently.

diskspd -c45g -b8K -t16 -o32 -r -d7200 -h -w0 -L -a0,1,2,3 F:\diskspd.dat >> SIOWS2012R203_Eiscsi_145_noh_write000.txt

diskspd -c45g -b8K -t16 -o32 -r -d7200 -h -w50 -L -a0,1,2,3 F:\diskspd.dat >> SIOWS2012R203_Eiscsi_145_noh_write050.txt

diskspd -c45g -b8K -t16 -o32 -r -d7200 -h -w100 -L -a0,1,2,3 F:\diskspd.dat >> SIOWS2012R203_Eiscsi_145_noh_write100.txt

diskspd -c45g -b8K -t16 -o32 -r -d7200 -h -S -w0 -L -a0,1,2,3 F:\diskspd.dat >> SIOWS2012R203_Eiscsi_145_noSh_test_write000.txt

diskspd -c45g -b8K -t16 -o32 -r -d7200 -h -S -w50 -L -a0,1,2,3 F:\diskspd.dat >> SIOWS2012R203_Eiscsi_145_noSh_write050.txt

diskspd -c45g -b8K -t16 -o32 -r -d7200 -h -S -w100 -L -a0,1,2,3 F:\diskspd.dat >> SIOWS2012R203_Eiscsi_145_noSh_write100.txt

The following is the output from the above workload command.
Microsoft Diskspd sample output
Microsoft Diskspd sample output part 2
Microsoft Diskspd sample output part 3

Note that as with any benchmark, workload test or simulation your results will vary. In the above the server, storage and I/O system were not tuned as the focus was on working with the tool, determining its capabilities. Thus do not focus on the performance results per say, rather what you can do with Diskspd as a tool to try different things. Btw, fwiw, in the above example in addition to using an iSCSI target, the Windows 2012 R2 server was a guest on a VMware ESXi 5.5 system.

Where to learn more

The following are related links to read more about server (cloud, virtual and physical) storage I/O benchmarking tools, technologies and techniques.

Drew Robb’s benchmarking quick reference guide
Server storage I/O benchmarking tools, technologies and techniques resource page
Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking 101 for Smarties.
Microsoft Diskspd download and Microsoft Diskspd overview (via Technet)
I/O, I/O how well do you know about good or bad server and storage I/Os?
Server and Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I and Part II)

Comments and wrap-up

What I like about Diskspd (Pros)

Reporting including CPU usage (you can’t do server and storage I/O without CPU) along with IOP’s (activity), bandwidth (throughout or amount of data being moved), per thread and total results along with optional reporting. While a GUI would be nice particular for beginners, I’m used to setting up scripts for different workloads so having an extensive options for setting up different workloads is welcome. Being associated with a specific OS (e.g. Windows) the CPU affinity and buffer management controls will be handy for some projects.

Diskspd has the flexibility to use different storage interfaces and types of storage including files or partitions should be taken for granted, however with some tools don’t take things for granted. I like the flexibility to easily specify various IO sizes including large 1MByte, 10MByte, 20MByte, 100MByte and 500MByte to simulate application workloads that do large sequential (or random) activity. I tried some IO sizes (e.g. specified by -b parameter larger than 500MB however, I received various errors including "Could not allocate a buffer bytes for target" which means that Diskspd can do IO sizes smaller than that. While not able to do IO sizes larger than 500MB, this is actually impressive. Several other tools I have used or with have IO size limits down around 10MByte which makes it difficult for creating workloads that do large IOP’s (note this is the IOP size, not the number of IOP’s).

Oh, something else that should be obvious however will state it, Diskspd is free unlike some industry de-facto standard tools or workload generators that need a fee to get and use.

Where Diskspd could be improved (Cons)

For some users a GUI or configuration wizard would make the tool easier to get started with, on the other hand (oth), I tend to use the command capabilities of tools. Would also be nice to specify ranges as part of a single command such as stepping through an IO size range (e.g. 4K, 8K, 16K, 1MB, 10MB) as well as read write percentages along with varying random sequential mixes. Granted this can easily be done by having a series of commands, however I have become spoiled by using other tools such as vdbench.

Summary

Server and storage I/O performance toolbox

Overall I like Diskspd and have added it to my Server Storage I/O workload and benchmark tool-box

Keep in mind that the best benchmark or workload generation technology tool will be your own application(s) configured to run as close as possible to production activity levels.

However when that is not possible, the an alternative is to use tools that have the flexibility to be configured as close as possible to your application(s) workload characteristics. This means that the focus should not be as much on the tool, as opposed to how flexible is a tool to work for you, granted the tool needs to be robust.

Having said that, Microsoft Diskspd is a good and extensible tool for benchmarking, simulation, validation and comparisons, however it will only be as good as the parameters and configuration you set it up to use.

Check out Microsoft Diskspd and add it to your benchmark and server storage I/O tool-box like I have done.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Server Storage I/O Benchmark Performance Resource Tools

Server Storage I/O Benchmarking Performance Resource Tools

server storage I/O trends

Updated 1/23/2018

Server storage I/O benchmark performance resource tools, various articles and tips. These include tools for legacy, virtual, cloud and software defined environments.

benchmark performance resource tools server storage I/O performance

The best server and storage I/O (input/output operation) is the one that you do not have to do, the second best is the one with the least impact.

server storage I/O locality of reference

This is where the idea of locality of reference (e.g. how close is the data to where your application is running) comes into play which is implemented via tiered memory, storage and caching shown in the figure above.

Cloud virtual software defined storage I/O

Server storage I/O performance applies to cloud, virtual, software defined and legacy environments

What this has to do with server storage I/O (and networking) performance benchmarking is keeping the idea of locality of reference, context and the application workload in perspective regardless of if cloud, virtual, software defined or legacy physical environments.

StorageIOblog: I/O, I/O how well do you know about good or bad server and storage I/Os?
StorageIOblog: Server and Storage I/O benchmarking 101 for smarties
StorageIOblog: Which Enterprise HDDs to use for a Content Server Platform (7 part series with using benchmark tools)
StorageIO.com: Enmotus FuzeDrive MicroTiering lab test using various tools
StorageIOblog: Some server storage I/O benchmark tools, workload scripts and examples (Part I) and (Part II)
StorageIOblog: Get in the NVMe SSD game (if you are not already)
Doridmen.com: Transcend SSD360S Review with tips on using ATTO and Crystal benchmark tools
ComputerWeekly: Storage performance metrics: How suppliers spin performance specifications

Via StorageIO Podcast: Kevin Closson discusses SLOB Server CPU I/O Database Performance benchmarks
Via @KevinClosson: SLOB Use Cases By Industry Vendors. Learn SLOB, Speak The Experts’ Language
Via BeyondTheBlocks (Reduxio): 8 Useful Tools for Storage I/O Benchmarking
Via CCSIObench: Cold-cache Sequential I/O Benchmark
Doridmen.com: Transcend SSD360S Review with tips on using ATTO and Crystal benchmark tools
CISJournal: Benchmarking the Performance of Microsoft Hyper-V server, VMware ESXi and Xen Hypervisors (PDF)
Microsoft TechNet:Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V large-scale VM performance for in-memory transaction processing
InfoStor: What’s The Best Storage Benchmark?
StorageIOblog: How to test your HDD, SSD or all flash array (AFA) storage fundamentals
Via ATTO: Atto V3.05 free storage test tool available
Via StorageIOblog: Big Files and Lots of Little File Processing and Benchmarking with Vdbench

Via StorageIO.com: Which Enterprise Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) to use with a Content Server Platform (White Paper)
Via VMware Blogs: A Free Storage Performance Testing Tool For Hyperconverged
Microsoft Technet: Test Storage Spaces Performance Using Synthetic Workloads in Windows Server
Microsoft Technet: Microsoft Windows Server Storage Spaces – Designing for Performance
BizTech: 4 Ways to Performance-Test Your New HDD or SSD
EnterpriseStorageForum: Data Storage Benchmarking Guide
StorageSearch.com: How fast can your SSD run backwards?
OpenStack: How to calculate IOPS for Cinder Storage ?
StorageAcceleration: Tips for Measuring Your Storage Acceleration

server storage I/O STI and SUT

Spiceworks: Determining HDD SSD SSHD IOP Performance
Spiceworks: Calculating IOPS from Perfmon data
Spiceworks: profiling IOPs

vdbench server storage I/O benchmark
Vdbench example via StorageIOblog.com

StorageIOblog: What does server storage I/O scaling mean to you?
StorageIOblog: What is the best kind of IO? The one you do not have to do
Testmyworkload.com: Collect and report various OS workloads
Whoishostingthis: Various SQL resources
StorageAcceleration: What, When, Why & How to Accelerate Storage
Filesystems.org: Various tools and links
StorageIOblog: Can we get a side of context with them IOPS and other storage metrics?

flash ssd and hdd

BrightTalk Webinar: Data Center Monitoring – Metrics that Matter for Effective Management
StorageIOblog: Enterprise SSHD and Flash SSD Part of an Enterprise Tiered Storage Strategy
StorageIOblog: Has SSD put Hard Disk Drives (HDD’s) On Endangered Species List?

server storage I/O bottlenecks and I/O blender

Microsoft TechNet: Measuring Disk Latency with Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon)
Via Scalegrid.io: How to benchmark MongoDB with YCSB? (Perfmon)
Microsoft MSDN: List of Perfmon counters for sql server
Microsoft TechNet: Taking Your Server’s Pulse
StorageIOblog: Part II: How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do with VMware?
CMG: I/O Performance Issues and Impacts on Time-Sensitive Applications

flash ssd and hdd

Virtualization Practice: IO IO it is off to Storage and IO metrics we go
InfoStor: Is HP Short Stroking for Performance and Capacity Gains?
StorageIOblog: Is Computer Data Storage Complex? It Depends
StorageIOblog: More storage and IO metrics that matter
StorageIOblog: Moving Beyond the Benchmark Brouhaha
Yellow-Bricks: VSAN VDI Benchmarking and Beta refresh!

server storage I/O benchmark example

YellowBricks: VSAN performance: many SAS low capacity VS some SATA high capacity?
YellowBricsk: VSAN VDI Benchmarking and Beta refresh!
StorageIOblog: Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD StorgeIO lab review
StorageIOblog: Part II: Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD StorgeIO lab review
StorageIOblog: Server Storage I/O Network Benchmark Winter Olympic Games

flash ssd and hdd

VMware VDImark aka View Planner (also here, here and here) as well as VMmark here
StorageIOblog: SPC and Storage Benchmarking Games
StorageIOblog: Speaking of speeding up business with SSD storage
StorageIOblog: SSD and Storage System Performance

Hadoop server storage I/O performance
Various Server Storage I/O tools in a hadoop environment

Michael-noll.com: Benchmarking and Stress Testing an Hadoop Cluster With TeraSort, TestDFSIO
Virtualization Practice: SSD options for Virtual (and Physical) Environments Part I: Spinning up to speed on SSD
StorageIOblog: Storage and IO metrics that matter
InfoStor: Storage Metrics and Measurements That Matter: Getting Started
SilvertonConsulting: Storage throughput vs. IO response time and why it matters
Splunk: The percentage of Read / Write utilization to get to 800 IOPS?

flash ssd and hdd
Various server storage I/O benchmarking tools

Spiceworks: What is the best IO IOPs testing tool out there
StorageIOblog: How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do?
StorageIOblog: Some Windows Server Storage I/O related commands
Openmaniak: Iperf overview and Iperf.fr: Iperf overview
StorageIOblog: Server and Storage I/O Benchmark Tools: Microsoft Diskspd (Part I and Part II)
Quest: SQL Server Perfmon Poster (PDF)
Server and Storage I/O Networking Performance Management (webinar)
Data Center Monitoring – Metrics that Matter for Effective Management (webinar)
Flash back to reality – Flash SSD Myths and Realities (Industry trends & benchmarking tips), (MSP CMG presentation)
DBAstackexchange: How can I determine how many IOPs I need for my AWS RDS database?
ITToolbox: Benchmarking the Performance of SANs

server storage IO labs

StorageIOblog: Dell Inspiron 660 i660, Virtual Server Diamond in the rough (Server review)
StorageIOblog: Part II: Lenovo TS140 Server and Storage I/O Review (Server review)
StorageIOblog: DIY converged server software defined storage on a budget using Lenovo TS140
StorageIOblog: Server storage I/O Intel NUC nick knack notes First impressions (Server review)
StorageIOblog & ITKE: Storage performance needs availability, availability needs performance
StorageIOblog: Why SSD based arrays and storage appliances can be a good idea (Part I)
StorageIOblog: Revisiting RAID storage remains relevant and resources

Interested in cloud and object storage visit our objectstoragecenter.com page, for flash SSD checkout storageio.com/ssd page, along with data protection, RAID, various industry links and more here.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

Watch for additional links to be added above in addition to those that appear via comments.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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I/O, I/O how well do you know good bad ugly server storage I/O iops?

How well do you know good bad ugly I/O iops?

server storage i/o iops activity data infrastructure trends

Updated 2/10/2018

There are many different types of server storage I/O iops associated with various environments, applications and workloads. Some I/Os activity are iops, others are transactions per second (TPS), files or messages per time (hour, minute, second), gets, puts or other operations. The best IO is one you do not have to do.

What about all the cloud, virtual, software defined and legacy based application that still need to do I/O?

If no IO operation is the best IO, then the second best IO is the one that can be done as close to the application and processor as possible with the best locality of reference.

Also keep in mind that aggregation (e.g. consolidation) can cause aggravation (server storage I/O performance bottlenecks).

aggregation causes aggravation
Example of aggregation (consolidation) causing aggravation (server storage i/o blender bottlenecks)

And the third best?

It’s the one that can be done in less time or at least cost or effect to the requesting application, which means moving further down the memory and storage stack.

solving server storage i/o blender and other bottlenecks
Leveraging flash SSD and cache technologies to find and fix server storage I/O bottlenecks

On the other hand, any IOP regardless of if for block, file or object storage that involves some context is better than those without, particular involving metrics that matter (here, here and here [webinar] )

Server Storage I/O optimization and effectiveness

The problem with IO’s is that they are a basic operations to get data into and out of a computer or processor, so there’s no way to avoid all of them, unless you have a very large budget. Even if you have a large budget that can afford an all flash SSD solution, you may still meet bottlenecks or other barriers.

IO’s require CPU or processor time and memory to set up and then process the results as well as IO and networking resources to move data too their destination or retrieve them from where they are stored. While IO’s cannot be eliminated, their impact can be greatly improved or optimized by, among other techniques, doing fewer of them via caching and by grouping reads or writes (pre-fetch, write-behind).

server storage I/O STI and SUT

Think of it this way: Instead of going on multiple errands, sometimes you can group multiple destinations together making for a shorter, more efficient trip. However, that optimization may also mean your drive will take longer. So, sometimes it makes sense to go on a couple of quick, short, low-latency trips instead of one larger one that takes half a day even as it accomplishes many tasks. Of course, how far you have to go on those trips (i.e., their locality) makes a difference about how many you can do in a given amount of time.

Locality of reference (or proximity)

What is locality of reference?

This refers to how close (i.e., its place) data exists to where it is needed (being referenced) for use. For example, the best locality of reference in a computer would be registers in the processor core, ready to be acted on immediately. This would be followed by levels 1, 2, and 3 (L1, L2, and L3) onboard caches, followed by main memory, or DRAM. After that comes solid-state memory typically NAND flash either on PCIe cards or accessible on a direct attached storage (DAS), SAN, or NAS device. 

server storage I/O locality of reference

Even though a PCIe NAND flash card is close to the processor, there still remains the overhead of traversing the PCIe bus and associated drivers. To help offset that impact, PCIe cards use DRAM as cache or buffers for data along with meta or control information to further optimize and improve locality of reference. In other words, this information is used to help with cache hits, cache use, and cache effectiveness vs. simply boosting cache use.

SSD to the rescue?

What can you do the cut the impact of IO’s?

There are many steps one can take, starting with establishing baseline performance and availability metrics.

The metrics that matter include IOP’s, latency, bandwidth, and availability. Then, leverage metrics to gain insight into your application’s performance.

Understand that IO’s are a fact of applications doing work (storing, retrieving, managing data) no matter whether systems are virtual, physical, or running up in the cloud. But it’s important to understand just what a bad IO is, along with its impact on performance. Try to identify those that are bad, and then find and fix the problem, either with software, application, or database changes. Perhaps you need to throw more software caching tools, hypervisors, or hardware at the problem. Hardware may include faster processors with more DRAM and faster internal busses.

Leveraging local PCIe flash SSD cards for caching or as targets is another option.

You may want to use storage systems or appliances that rely on intelligent caching and storage optimization capabilities to help with performance, availability, and capacity.

Where to gain insight into your server storage I/O environment

There are many tools that you can be used to gain insight into your server storage I/O environment across cloud, virtual, software defined and legacy as well as from different layers (e.g. applications, database, file systems, operating systems, hypervisors, server, storage, I/O networking). Many applications along with databases have either built-in or optional tools from their provider, third-party, or via other sources that can give information about work activity being done. Likewise there are tools to dig down deeper into the various data information infrastructure to see what is happening at the various layers as shown in the following figures.

application storage I/O performance
Gaining application and operating system level performance insight via different tools

windows and linux storage I/O performance
Insight and awareness via operating system tools on Windows and Linux

In the above example, Spotlight on Windows (SoW) which you can download for free from Dell here along with Ubuntu utilities are shown, You could also use other tools to look at server storage I/O performance including Windows Perfmon among others.

vmware server storage I/O
Hypervisor performance using VMware ESXi / vsphere built-in tools

vmware server storage I/O performance
Using Visual ESXtop to dig deeper into virtual server storage I/O performance

vmware server storage i/o cache
Gaining insight into virtual server storage I/O cache performance

Wrap up and summary

There are many approaches to address (e.g. find and fix) vs. simply move or mask data center and server storage I/O bottlenecks. Having insight and awareness into how your environment along with applications is important to know to focus resources. Also keep in mind that a bit of flash SSD or DRAM cache in the applicable place can go along way while a lot of cache will also cost you cash. Even if you cant eliminate I/Os, look for ways to decrease their impact on your applications and systems.

Where To Learn More

View additional NAS, NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and HDD related topics via the following links.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

>Keep in mind: SSD including flash and DRAM among others are in your future, the question is where, when, with what, how much and whose technology or packaging.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Green and Virtual IT Data Center Primer

Green and Virtual Data Center Primer

Moving beyond Green Hype and Green washing

Green IT is about enabling efficient, effective and productive information services delivery. There is a growing green gap between green hype messaging or green washing and IT pain point issues including limits on availability or rising costs of power, cooling, floor-space as well as e-waste and environmental health and safety (PCFE). To close the gap will involve addressing green messaging and rhetoric closer to where IT organizations pain points are and where budget dollars exists that can address PCFE and other green related issues as a by-product. The green gap will also be narrowed as awareness of broader green related topics coincide with IT data center pain points, in other words, alignment of messaging with IT issues that have or will have budget dollars allocated towards them to sustain business and economic growth via IT resource usage efficiency. Read more here.

There are many aspects to "Green" Information Technology including servers, storage, networks and associated management tools and techniques. The reasons and focus of "Green IT" including "Green Data Storage ", "Green Computing" and related focus areas are varied to discuss diverse needs, issues and requirements including among others:

  • Power, Cooling, Floor-space, Environmental (PCFE) related issues or constraints
  • Reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and other green house gases (GHGs)
  • Business growth and economic sustain in an environmental friendly manner
  • Proper disposal or recycling of environmental harmful retired technology components
  • Reduction or better efficiency of electrical power consumption used for IT equipment
  • Cost avoidance or savings from lower energy fees and cooling costs
  • Support data center and application consolidation to cut cost and management
  • Enable growth and enhancements to application service level objectives
  • Maximize the usage of available power and cooling resources available in your region
  • Compliance with local or federal government mandates and regulations
  • Economic sustain and ability to support business growth and service improvements
  • General environmental awareness and stewardship to save and protect the earth

While much of the IT industry focuses on CO2 emissions footprints, data management software and electrical power consumption, cooling and ventilation of IT data centers is an area of focus associated with "Green IT" as well as a means to discuss more effective use of electrical energy that can yield rapid results for many environments. Large tier-1 vendors including HP and IBM among others who have an IT and data center wide focus have services designed to do quick assessments as well as detailed analysis and re-organization of IT data center physical facilities to improve air flow and power consumption for more effective cooling of IT technologies including servers, storage, networks and other equipment.

Similar to your own residence, basic steps to improve your cooling effectiveness can lead to use of less energy to cut your budget impact, or, enable you to do more with what you already have with your cooling capacity to support growth, acquisitions and or consolidation initiatives. Vendors are also looking at means and alternatives for cooling IT equipment ranging from computer assisted computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software analysis of data center cooling and ventilation to refrigerated cooling racks some leveraging water or inert liquid cooling.

Various metrics exists and others are evolving for measuring, estimating, reporting, analyzing and discussing IT Data Center infrastructure resource topics including servers, storage, networks, facilities and associated software management tools from a power, cooling and green environmental standpoint. The importance of metrics is to focus on the larger impact of a piece of IT equipment that includes its cost and energy consumption that factors in cooling and other hosting or site environmental costs. Naturally energy costs and CO2 (carbon offsets) will vary by geography and region along with type of electrical power being used (Coal, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Wind, Thermo, Solar, etc) and other factors that should be kept in perspective as part of the big picture.

Consequently your view and needs or interests around "Green" IT may be from an electrical power conservation perspective to maximize your power consumption or to adapt to a given power footprint or ceiling. Your focus around "Green" Data Centers and Green Storage may be from a carbon savings standpoint or proper disposition of old and retired IT equipment or from a data center cooling standpoint. Another area of focus may be that you are looking to cut your data footprint to align with your power, cooling and green footprint while enhancing application and data service delivery to your customers.

Where to learn more

The following are useful links to related efficient, effective, productive, flexible, scalable and resilient IT data center along with server storage I/O networking hardware and software that supports cloud and virtual green data centers.

Various IT industry vendor and service provider links
Green and Virtual Data Center: Productive Economical Efficient Effective Flexible
Green and Virtual Data Center links
Are large storage arrays dead at the hands of SSD?
Closing the Green Gap
Energy efficient technology sales depend on the pitch

What this all means

The result of a green and virtual data center is that of a flexible, agile, resilient, scalable information factory that is also economical, productive, efficient, productive as well as sustainable.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Green and Virtual Data Center: Productive Economical Efficient Effective Flexible

Green and Virtual Data Center

A Green and Virtual IT Data Center (e.g. an information factory) means an environment comprising:

  • Habitat for technology or physical infrastructure (e.g. physical data center, yours, co-lo, managed service or cloud)
  • Power, cooling, communication networks, HVAC, smoke and fire suppression, physical security
  • IT data information infrastructure (e.g. hardware, software, valueware, cloud, virtual, physical, servers, storage, network)
  • Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) along with IT Service Management (ITSM) software defined management tools
  • Tools for monitoring, resource tracking and usage, reporting, diagnostics, provisioning and resource orchestration
  • Portals and service catalogs for automated, user initiated and assisted operation or access to IT resources
  • Processes, procedures, best-practices, work-flows and templates (including data protection with HA, BC, BR, DR, backup/restore, logical and physical security)
  • Metrics that matter for management insight and awareness
    People and skill sets among other items

Green and Virtual Data Center Resources

Click here to learn about "The Green and Virtual Data Center" book (CRC Press) for enabling efficient, productive IT data centers. This book covers cloud, virtualization, servers, storage, networks, software, facilities and associated management topics, technologies and techniques including metrics that matter. This book by industry veteran IT advisor and author Greg Schulz is the definitive guide for enabling economic efficiency and productive next generation data center strategies.

Intel recommended reading
Publisher: CRC Press – Taylor & Francis Group
By Greg P. Schulz of StorageIO www.storageio.com
 ISBN-10: 1439851739 and ISBN-13: 978-1439851739
 Hardcover * 370 pages * Over 100 illustrations figures and tables

Read more here and order your copy here. Also check out Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press) a new book by Greg Schulz.

Productive Efficient Effective Economical Flexible Agile and Sustainable

Green hype and green washing may be on the endangered species list and going away, however, green IT for servers, storage, networks, facilities as well as related software and management techniques that address energy efficiency including power and cooling along with e-waste, environmental health and safety related issues are topics that wont be going away anytime soon. There is a growing green gap between green hype messaging or green washing and IT pain point issues including limits on availability or rising costs of power, cooling, floor-space as well as e-waste and environmental health and safety (PCFE). To close the gap will involve addressing green messaging and rhetoric closer to where IT organizations pain points are and where budget dollars exists that can address PCFE and other green related issues as a by-product.

The green gap will also be narrowed as awareness of broader green related topics coincide with IT data center pain points, in other words, alignment of messaging with IT issues that have or will have budget dollars allocated towards them to sustain business and economic growth via IT resource usage efficiency. Read more here.

Where to learn more

The following are useful links to related efficient, effective, productive, flexible, scalable and resilient IT data center along with server storage I/O networking hardware and software that supports cloud and virtual green data centers.

Various IT industry vendor and service provider links
Green and Virtual Data Center Primer
Green and Virtual Data Center links
Are large storage arrays dead at the hands of SSD?
Closing the Green Gap
Energy efficient technology sales depend on the pitch
EPA Energy Star for Data Center Storage Update
EPA Energy Star for data center storage draft 3 specification
Green IT Confusion Continues, Opportunities Missed! 
Green IT deferral blamed on economic recession might be result of green gap
How much SSD do you need vs. want?
How to reduce your Data Footprint impact (Podcast) 
Industry trend: People plus data are aging and living longer
In the data center or information factory, not everything is the same
More storage and IO metrics that matter
Optimizing storage capacity and performance to reduce your data footprint 
Performance metrics: Evaluating your data storage efficiency
PUE, Are you Managing Power, Energy or Productivity?
Saving Money with Green Data Storage Technology
Saving Money with Green IT: Time To Invest In Information Factories 
Shifting from energy avoidance to energy efficiency
SNIA Green Storage Knowledge Center
Speaking of speeding up business with SSD storage
SSD and Green IT moving beyond green washing
Storage Efficiency and Optimization: The Other Green
Supporting IT growth demand during economic uncertain times
The Green and Virtual Data Center Book (CRC Press, Intel Recommended Reading)
The new Green IT: Efficient, Effective, Smart and Productive 
The other Green Storage: Efficiency and Optimization 
What is the best kind of IO? The one you do not have to do

Watch for more links and resources to be added soon.

What this all means

The result of a green and virtual data center is that of a flexible, agile, resilient, scalable information factory that is also economical, productive, efficient, productive as well as sustainable.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Green and Virtual Data Center Links

Updated 10/25/2017

Green and Virtual IT Data Center Links

Moving beyond Green Hype and Green washing

Green hype and green washing may be on the endangered species list and going away, however, green IT for servers, storage, networks, facilities as well as related software and management techniques that address energy efficiency including power and cooling along with e-waste, environmental health and safety related issues are topics that wont be going away anytime soon.

There is a growing green gap between green hype messaging or green washing and IT pain point issues including limits on availability or rising costs of power, cooling, floor-space as well as e-waste and environmental health and safety (PCFE).

To close the gap will involve addressing green messaging and rhetoric closer to where IT organizations pain points are and where budget dollars exists that can address PCFE and other green related issues as a by-product. The green gap will also be narrowed as awareness of broader green related topics coincide with IT data center pain points, in other words, alignment of messaging with IT issues that have or will have budget dollars allocated towards them to sustain business and economic growth via IT resource usage efficiency. Read more here.

Enabling Effective Produtive Efficient Economical Flexible Scalable Resilient Information Infrastrctures

The following are useful links to related efficient, effective, productive, flexible, scalable and resilient IT data center along with server storage I/O networking hardware and software that supports cloud and virtual green data centers.

Various IT industry vendors and other links

Via StorageIOblog – Happy Earth Day 2016 Eliminating Digital and Data e-Waste

Green and Virtual Data Center Primer
Green and Virtual Data Center: Productive Economical Efficient Effective Flexible
Are large storage arrays dead at the hands of SSD?
Closing the Green Gap
Energy efficient technology sales depend on the pitch
EPA Energy Star for Data Center Storage Update
EPA Energy Star for data center storage draft 3 specification
Green IT Confusion Continues, Opportunities Missed! 
Green IT deferral blamed on economic recession might be result of green gap
How much SSD do you need vs. want?
How to reduce your Data Footprint impact (Podcast) 
Industry trend: People plus data are aging and living longer
In the data center or information factory, not everything is the same
More storage and IO metrics that matter
Optimizing storage capacity and performance to reduce your data footprint 
Performance metrics: Evaluating your data storage efficiency
PUE, Are you Managing Power, Energy or Productivity?
Saving Money with Green Data Storage Technology
Saving Money with Green IT: Time To Invest In Information Factories 
Shifting from energy avoidance to energy efficiency
SNIA Green Storage Knowledge Center
Speaking of speeding up business with SSD storage
SSD and Green IT moving beyond green washing
Storage Efficiency and Optimization: The Other Green
Supporting IT growth demand during economic uncertain times
The Green and Virtual Data Center Book (CRC Press, Intel Recommended Reading)
The new Green IT: Efficient, Effective, Smart and Productive 
The other Green Storage: Efficiency and Optimization 
What is the best kind of IO? The one you do not have to do

Intel recommended reading
Click here to learn about "The Green and Virtual Data Center" book (CRC Press) for enabling efficient , productive IT data centers. This book covers cloud, virtualization, servers, storage, networks, software, facilities and associated management topics, technologies and techniques including metrics that matter. This book by industry veteran IT advisor and author Greg Schulz is the definitive guide for enabling economic efficiency and productive next generation data center strategies. Read more here and order your copyhere. Also check out Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press) a new book by Greg Schulz.

White papers, analyst reports and perspectives

Business benefits of data footprint reduction (archiving, compression, de-dupe)
Data center I/O and performance issues – Server I/O and storage capacity gap
Analysis of EPA Report to Congress (Law 109-431)
The Many Faces of MAID Storage Technology
Achieving Energy Efficiency with FLASH based SSD
MAID 2.0: Energy Savings without Performance Compromises

Articles, Tips, Blogs, Webcasts and Podcasts

AP – SNIA Green Emerald Program and measurements
AP – Southern California heat wave strains electrical system
Ars Technica – EPA: Power usage in data centers could double by 2011
Ars Technica – Meet the climate savers: Major tech firms launch war on energy-inefficient PCs – Article
Askageek.com – Buying an environmental friendly laptop – November 2008
Baseline – Examining Energy Consumption in the Data Center
Baseline – Burts Bees: What IT Means When You Go Green
Bizcovering – Green architecture for the masses
Broadstuff – Are Green 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Incompatible?
Business Week – CEO Guide to Technology
Business Week – Computers’ elusive eco factor
Business Week – Clean Energy – Its Getting Affordable
Byte & Switch – Keeping it Green This Summer – Don’t be "Green washed"
Byte & Switch – IBM Sees Green in Energy Certificates
Byte & Switch – Users Search for power solutions
Byte & Switch – DoE issues Green Storage Warning
CBR – The Green Light for Green IT
CBR – Big boxes make greener data centers
CFO – Power Scourge
Channel Insider – A 12 Step Program to Dispose of IT Equipment
China.org.cn – China publishes Energy paper
CIO – Green Storage Means Money Saved on Power
CIO – Data center designers share secrets for going green
CIO – Best Place to Build a Data Center in North America
CIO Insight – Clever Marketing or the Real Thing?
Cleantechnica – Cooling Data Centers Could Prevent Massive Electrical Waste – June 2008
Climatebiz – Carbon Calculators Yield Spectrum of Results: Study
CNET News – Linux coders tackle power efficiency
CNET News – Research: Old data centers can be nearly as ‘green’ as new ones
CNET News – Congress, Greenpeace move on e-wast
CNN Money – A Green Collar Recession
CNN Money – IBM creates alliance with industry leaders supporting new data center standards
Communication News – Utility bills key to greener IT
Computerweekly – Business case for green storage
Computerweekly – Optimising data centre operations
Computerweekly – Green still good for IT, if it saves money
Computerweekly – Meeting the Demands for storage
Computerworld – Wells Fargo Free Data Center Cooling System
Computerworld – Seven ways to get green and save money
Computerworld – Build your data center here: The most energy-efficient locations
Computerworld – EPA: U.S. needs more power plants to support data centers
Computerworld – GreenIT: A marketing ploy or new technology?
Computerworld – Gartner Criticizes Green Grid
Computerworld – IT Skills no longer sufficient for data center execs.
Computerworld – Meet MAID 2.0 and Intelligent Power Management
Computerworld – Feds to offer energy ratings on servers and storage
Computerworld – Greenpeace still hunting for truly green electronics
Computerworld – How to benchmark data center energy costs
ComputerworldUK – Datacenters at risk from poor governance
ComputerworldUK – Top IT Leaders Back Green Survey
ComputerworldMH – Lean and Green
CTR – Strategies for enhancing energy efficiency
CTR – Economies of Scale – Green Data Warehouse Appliances
Datacenterknowledge – Microsoft to build Illinois datacenter
Data Center Strategies – Storage The Next Hot Topic
Earthtimes – Fujitsu installs hydrogen fuel cell power
eChannelline – IBM Goes Green(er)
Ecoearth.info – California Moves To Speed Solar, Wind Power Grid Connections
Ecogeek – Solar power company figures they can power 90% of America
Economist – Cool IT
Electronic Design – How many watts in that Gigabyte
eMazzanti – Desktop virtualization movement creeping into customer sites
ens-Newswire – Western Governors Ask Obama for National Green Energy Plan
Environmental Leader – Best Place to Build an Energy Efficient Data Center
Environmental Leader – New Guide Helps Advertisers Avoid Greenwash Complaints
Enterprise Storage Forum – Power Struggles Take Center Stage at SNW
Enterprise Storage Forum – Pace Yourself for Storage Power & Cooling Needs
Enterprise Storage Forum – Storage Power and Cooling Issues Heat Up – StorageIO Article
Enterprise Storage Forum – Score Savings With A Storage Power Play
Enterprise Storage Forum – I/O, I/O, Its off to Virtual Work I Go
Enterprise Storage Forum – Not Just a Flash in the Pan – Various SSD options
Enterprise Storage Forum – Closing the Green Gap – Article August 2008
EPA Report to Congress and Public Law 109-431 – Reports & links
eWeek – Saving Green by being Green
eWeek – ‘No Cooling Necessary’ Data Centers Coming?
eWeek – How the ‘Down’ Macroeconomy Will Impact the Data Storage Sector
ExpressComputer – In defense of Green IT
ExpressComputer – What data center crisis
Forbes – How to Build a Quick Charging Battery
GCN – Sun launches eco data center
GreenerComputing – New Code of Conduct to Establish Best Practices in Green Data Centers
GreenerComputing – Silicon valley’s green detente
GreenerComputing – Majority of companies plan to green their data centers
GreenerComputing – Citigroup to spend $232M on Green Data Center
GreenerComputing – Chicago and Quincy, WA Top Green Data Center Locations
GreenerComputing – Using airside economizers to chill data center cooling bills
GreenerComputing – Making the most of asset disposal
GreenerComputing – Greenpeace vendor rankings
GreenerComputing – Four Steps to Improving Data Center Efficiency without Capital Expenditures
GreenerComputing – Enabling a Green and Virtual Data Center
Green-PC – Strategic Steps Down the Green Path
Greeniewatch – BBC news chiefs attack plans for climate change campaign
Greeniewatch – Warmest year predictions and data that has not yet been measured
GoverenmentExecutive – Public Private Sectors Differ on "Green" Efforts
HPC Wire – How hot is your code
Industry Standard – Why green data centers mean partner opportunities
InformationWeek – It could be 15 years before we know what is really green
InformationWeek – Beyond Server Consolidaiton
InformationWeek – Green IT Beyond Virtualization: The Case For Consolidation
InfoWorld – Sun celebrates green datacenter innovations
InfoWorld – Tech’s own datacenters are their green showrooms
InfoWorld – 2007: The Year in Green
InfoWorld – Green Grid Announces Tech Forum in Feb 2008
InfoWorld – SPEC seeds future green-server benchmarks
InfoWorld – Climate Savers green catalog proves un-ripe
InfoWorld – Forester: Eco-minded activity up among IT pros
InfoWorld – Green ventures in Silicon Valley, Mass reaped most VC cash in ’07
InfoWorld – Congress misses chance to see green-energy growth
InfoWorld – Unisys pushes green envelope with datacenter expansion
InfoWorld – No easy green strategy for storage
Internet News – Storage Technologies for a Slowing Economy
Internet News – Economy will Force IT to Transform
ITManagement – Green Computing, Green Revenue
itnews – Data centre chiefs dismiss green hype
itnews – Australian Green IT regulations could arrive this year
IT Pro – SNIA Green storage metrics released
ITtoolbox – MAID discussion
Linux Power – Saving power with Linux on Intel platforms
MSNBC – Microsoft to build data center in Ireland
National Post – Green technology at the L.A. Auto Show
Network World – Turning the datacenter green
Network World – Color Interop Green
Network World – Green not helpful word for setting environmental policies
NewScientistEnvironment – Computer servers as bad for climate as SUVs
Newser – Texas commission approves nation’s largest wind power project
New Yorker – Big Foot: In measuring carbon emissions, it’s easy to confuse morality and science
NY Times – What the Green Bubble Will Leave Behind
PRNewswire – Al Gore and Cisco CEO John Chambers to debate climate change
Processor – More than just monitoring
Processor – The new data center: What’s hot in Data Center physical infrastructure:
Processor – Liquid Cooling in the Data Center
Processor – Curbing IT Power Usage
Processor – Services To The Rescue – Services Available For Today’s Data Centers
Processor – Green Initiatives: Hire A Consultant?
Processor – Energy-Saving Initiatives
Processor – The EPA’s Low Carbon Campaig
Processor – Data Center Power Planning
SAN Jose Mercury – Making Data Centers Green
SDA-Asia – Green IT still a priority despite Credit Crunch
SearchCIO – EPA report gives data centers little guidance
SearchCIO – Green IT Strategies Could Lead to hefty ROIs
SearchCIO – Green IT In the Data Center: Plenty of Talk, not much Walk
SearchCIO – Green IT Overpitched by Vendors, CIOs beware
SearchDataCenter – Study ranks cheapest places to build a data center
SearchDataCenter – Green technology still ranks low for data center planners
SearchDataCenter – Green Data Center: Energy Effiecnty Computing in the 21st Century
SearchDataCenter – Green Data Center Advice: Is LEED Feasible
SearchDataCenter – Green Data Centers Tackle LEED Certification
SearchDataCenter – PG&E invests in data center effieicny
SearchDataCenter – A solar powered datacenter
SearchSMBStorage – Improve your storage energy efficiency
SearchSMBStorage – SMB capacity planning: Focusing on energy conservation
SearchSMBStorage – Data footprint reduction for SMBs
SearchSMBStorage – MAID & other energy-saving storage technologies for SMBs
SearchStorage – How to increase your storage energy efficiency
SearchStorage – Is storage now top energy hog in the data center
SearchStorage – Storage eZine: Turning Storage Green
SearchStorage – The Green Storage Gap
SearchStorageChannel – Green Data Storage Projects
Silicon.com – The greening of IT: Cooling costs
SNIA – SNIA Green Storage Overview
SNIA – Green Storage
SNW – Beyond Green-wash
SNW Spring 2008 Beyond Green-wash
State.org – Why Texas Has Its Own Power Grid
StorageDecisions – Different Shades of Green
Storage Magazine – Storage still lacks energy metrics
StorageIOblog – Posts pertaining to Green, power, cooling, floor-space, EHS (PCFE)
Storage Search – Various postings, news and topics pertaining to Green IT
Technology Times – Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches
TechTarget – Data center power efficiency
TechTarget – Tip for determining power consumption
Techworld – Inside a green data center
Techworld – Box reduction – Low hanging green datacenter fruit
Techworld – Datacentere used to heat swimming pool
Theinquirer – Spansion and Virident flash server farms
Theinquirer – Storage firms worry about energy efficiency How green is the valley
TheRegister – Data Centre Efficiency, the good, the bad and the way to hot
TheRegister – Server makers snub whalesong for serious windmill abuse
TheRegister – Green data center threat level: Not Green
The Standard – Growing cynicism around going Green
ThoughtPut – Energy Central
Thoughtput – Power, Cooling, Green Storage and related industry trends
Wallstreet Journal – Utilities Amp Up Push To Slash Energy Use
Wallstreet Journal – The IT in Green Investing
Wallstreet Journal – Tech’s Energy Consumption on the Rise
Washingtonpost – Texas approves major new wind power project
WhatPC – Green IT: It doesnt have to cost the earth
WHIRnews – SingTel building green data center
Wind-watch.org – Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency
WyomingNews – Overcoming Greens Stereotype
Yahoo – Washington Senate Unviel Green Job Plan
ZDnet – Will supercomputer speeds hit a plateau?
Are data centers causing climate change

News and Press Releases

Business Wire – The Green and Virtual Data Center
Enterprise Storage Forum – Intel and HGST (Hitachi) partner on FLASH SSD
PCworld – Intel and HP describe Green Strategy
DoE – To Invest Approximately $1.3 Billion to Commercialize CCS Technology
Yahoo – Shell Opens Los Angeles’ First Combined Hydrogen and Gasoline Station
DuPont – DuPont Projects Save Enough Energy to Power 25,000 Homes
Gartner – Users Are Becoming Increasingly Confused About the Issues and Solutions Surrounding Green IT

Websites and Tools

Various power, cooling, emmisions and device configuration tools and calculators
Solar Action Alliance web site
SNIA Emerald program
Carbon Disclosure Project
The Chicago Climate Exchange
Climate Savers
Data Center Decisions
Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA)
EMC – Digital Life Calculator
Energy Star
Energy Star Data Center Initiatives
Greenpeace – Technology ranking website also here
GlobalActionPlan
KyotoPlanet
LBNL High Tech Data centers
Millicomputing
RoHS & WEE News
Storage Performance Council (SPC)
SNIA Green Technical Working Group
SPEC
Transaction Processing Council (TPC)
The Green Grid
The Raised Floor
Terra Pass Carbon Offset Credits – Website with CO2 calculators
Energy Information Administration – EIA (US and International Electrical Information)
U.S. Department of Energy and related information
U.S. DOE Energy Efficient Industrial Programs
U.S. EPA server and storage energy topics
Zerofootprint – Various "Green" and environmental related links and calculators

Vendor Centric and Marketing Website Links and tools

Vendors and organizations have different types of calculators some with focus on power, cooling, floor space, carbon offsets or emissions,

ROI, TCO and other IT data center infrastructure resource management. Following is an evolving list and by no means definitive even for a particular vendors as

different manufactures may have multiple different calculators for different product lines or areas of focus.

Brocade – Green website
Cisco – Green and Environmental websites here, here and here
Dell – Green website
EMC – EMC Energy, Power and Cooling Related Website
HDS – How to be green – HDS Positioning White Paper
HP – HP Green Website
IBM – Green Data Center – IBM Positioning White Paper
IBM – Green Data Center for Education – IBM Positioning White Paper
Intel – What is an Efficient Data Center and how do I measure it?
LSI – Green site and white paper
NetApp – Press Release and related information
Sun – Various articles and links
Symantec – Global 2000 Struggle to Adopt "Green" Data Centers – Announcement of Survey results
ACTON
Adinfa
APC
Australian Conservation Foundation
Avocent
BBC
Brocade
Carbon Credit Calculator UK
Carbon Footprint Site
Carbon Planet
Carbonify
CarbonZero
Cassatt
CO2 Stats Site
Copan
Dell
DirectGov UK Acton
Diesel Service & Supply Power Calculator & Converter
Eaton Powerware
Ecobusinesslinks
Ecoscale
EMC Power Calculator
EMC Web Power Calculator
EMC Digital Life Calculator
EPA Power Profiler
EPA Related Tools
EPEAT
Google UK Green Footprint
Green Grid Calculator
HP and more here
HVAC Calculator
IBM
Logicalis
Kohler Power (Business and Residential)
Micron
MSN Carbon Footprint Calculator
National Wildlife Foundation
NEF UK
NetApp
Rackwise
Platespin
Safecom
Sterling Planet
Sun and more here and here and here
Tandberg
TechRepublic
TerraPass Carbon Offset Credits
Thomas Kreen AG
Toronto Hydro Calculator
80 Plus Calculator
VMware
42u Green Grid PUE DCiE calculator
42u energy calculator

Green and Virtual Tools

What’s your power, cooling, floor space, energy, environmental or green story?

What’s your power, cooling, floor space, energy, environmental or green story? Do you have questions or want to learn more about

energy issues pertaining to IT data center and data infrastructure topics? Do you have a solution or technology or a success story that you would like to share

with us pertaining to data storage and server I/O energy optimization strategies?  Do you need assistance in developing, validating or reviewing your strategy

or story? Contact us at: info@storageio.com or 651-275-1563 to learn more about green data storage and server I/O or to

schedule a briefing to tell us about your energy efficiency and effectiveness story pertaining to IT data centers and data infrastructures.

Disclaimer and note:  URL’s submitted for inclusion on this site will be reviewed for consideration and to be

in generally accepted good taste in regards to the theme of this site.  Best effort has been made to validate and verify the URLs that appear on this page and

website however they are subject to change. The author and/or maintainer’s) of this page and web site make no endorsement to and assume no responsibility for the

URLs and their content that are listed on this page.

Green and Virtual Metrics

Chapter 5 "Measurement, Metrics, and Management of IT Resources" in the book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC Press) takes a look at the importance of being able to measure and monitor to enable effective management and utilization of IT resources across servers, storage, I/O networks, software, hardware and facilities.

There are many different points of interest for collecting metrics in an IT data center for servers, storage, networking and facilities along with various points of interest or perspectives. Data center personal have varied interest from a facilities to a resource (server, storage, networking) usage and effectiveness perspective for normal use as well as planning purposes or comparison when evaluating new technology. Vendors have different uses for metrics during R&D, Q/A testing and marketing or sales campaigns as well as on-going service and support. Industry trade groups including 80 Plus, SNIA and the green grid along with government groups including the EPA Energy Star are working to define and establish applicable metrics pertinent for Green and Virtual data centers.

Acronym

Description

Comment

DCiE

Data center Efficiency = (IT equipment / Total facility power) * 100

Shows a ratio of how well a data center is consuming power

DCPE

Data center Performance Efficiency = Effective IT workload / total facility power

Shows how effective data center is consuming power to produce a given level of service or work such as energy per transaction or energy per business function performed

PUE

Power usage effectiveness = Total facility power / IT equipment power

Inverse of DCE

Kilowatts (kw)

Watts / 1,000

One thousand watts

Annual kWh

kWh x 24 x 365

kWh used in on year

Megawatts (mw)

kW / 1,000

One thousand kW

BTU/hour

watts x 3.413

Heat generated in an hour from using energy in British Thermal Units. 12,000 BTU/hour can equate to 1 Ton of cooling.

kWh

1,000 watt hours

The number of watts used in one hour

Watts

Amps x Volts (e.g. 12 amps * 12 volts = 144 watts)

Unit of electrical energy power

Watts

BTU/hour x 0.293

Convert BTU/hr to watts

Volts

Watts / Amps (e.g. 144 watts / 12 amps = 12 volts)

The amount of force on electrons

Amps

Watts / Volts (e.g. 144 watts / 12 volts = 12 amps)

The flow rate of electricity

Volt-Amperes (VA)

Volts x Amps

Sometimes power expressed in Volt-Ampres

kVA

Volts x Amp / 1000

Number of kilovolt-ampres

kW

kVA x power-factor

Power factor is the efficiency of a piece of equipments use of power

kVA

kW / power-factor

Killovolt-Ampres

U

1U = 1.75”

EIA metric describing height of equipment in racks.

 

Activity / Watt Amount of work accomplished per unit of energy consumed. This could be IOPS, Transactions or Bandwidth per watt. Indicator how much work and how efficient energy is being used to accomplish useful work. This metric applies to active workloads or actively used and frequently accessed storage and data. Examples would be IOPS per watt, Bandwidth per watt, Transactions per watt, Users or streams per watt. Activity per watt should also be used in conjunction with another metric such as how much capacity is supported per watt and total watts consumed for a representative picture.

IOPS / Watt

Number of I/O operations (or transactions) / energy (watts)

Indicator of how effectively energy is being used to perform a given amount of work. The work could be I/Os, transactions, throughput or other indicator of application activity. For example SPC-1 / Watt, SPEC / Watt, TPC / Watt, transaction / watt,  IOP / Watt.

Bandwidth / Watt GBPS or TBPS or PBPS / Watt Amount of data transferred or moved per second and energy used. Often confused with Capacity per watt This indicates how much data is moved or accessed per second or time interval per unit of energy consumed. This is often confused with capacity per watt given that both bandwidth and capacity reference GByte, TByte, PByte.

Capacity / Watt

GB or TB or PB (storage capacity space / watt

Indicator of how much capacity (space) or bandwidth supported in a given configuration or footprint per watt of energy. For inactive data or off-line and archive data, capacity per watt can be an effective measurement gauge however for active workloads and applications activity per watt also needs to be looked at to get a representative indicator of how energy is being used

Mhz / Watt

Processor performance / energy (watts)

Indicator of how effectively energy is being used by a CPU or processor.

Carbon Credit

Carbon offset credit

Offset credits that can be bought and sold to offset your CO2 emissions

CO2 Emission

Average 1.341 lbs per kWh of electricity generated

The amount of average carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from generating an average kWh of electricity

Various power, cooling, floor space and green storage or IT  related metrics

Metrics include Data center Efficiency (DCiE) via the greengrid which is the indicator ratio of a IT data center energy efficiency defined as IT equipment (servers, disk and tape storage, networking switches, routers, printers, etc) / Total facility power x 100 (for percentage). For example, if the sum of all IT equipment energy usage resulted in 1,500 kilowatt hours (kWh) per month yet the total facility power including UPS, energy switching, power conversation and filtering, cooling and associated infrastructure costs as well as IT equipment resulting in 3,500 kWh, the DCiE would be (1,500 / 3,500) x 100 = 43%. DCiE can be used as a ratio for example to show in the above scenario that IT equipment accounts for about 43% of energy consumed by the data center with in this scenario 57% of electrical energy being consumed by cooling, conversion and conditioning or lighting.

Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is the indicator ratio of total energy being consumed by the data center to energy being used to operate IT equipment. PUE is defined as total facility power / IT equipment energy consumption. Using the above scenario PUE = 2.333 (3,500 / 1,500) which means that a server requiring 100 watts of power would actually require (2.333 * 100) 233.3 watts of energy that includes both direct power and cooling costs. Similarly a storage system that required 1,500 kWh of energy to power would require (1,500*2.333) 3,499.5 kWh of electrical power including cooling.

Another metric that has the potential to have meaning is Data center Performance Efficiency (DCPE) that takes into consideration how much useful and effective work is performed by the IT equipment and data center per energy consumed. DCPE is defined as useful work / total facility power with an example being some number of transactions processed using servers, networks and storage divided by energy for the data center to power and cool the equipment. An relatively easy and straightforward implementation of DCPE is an IOPs per watt measurement that looks at how many IOPs can be performed (regardless of size or type such as reads or writes) per unit of energy in this case watts.

DCPE = Useful work / Total facility power, for example IOPS per watt of energy used

DCiE = IT equipment energy / Total facility power = 1 / PUE

PUE = Total facility energy / IT equipment energy

IOPS per Watt = Number of IOPs (or bandwidth) / energy used by the storage system

The importance of these numbers and metrics is to focus on the larger impact of a piece of IT equipment that includes its cost and energy consumption that factors in cooling and other hosting or site environmental costs. Naturally energy costs and CO2 (carbon offsets) will vary by geography and region along with type of electrical power being used (Coal, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Wind, Thermo, Solar, etc) and other factors that should be kept in perspective as part of the big picture. Learn more in Chapter 5 "Measurement, Metrics, and Management of IT Resources" in the book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) and in the book Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC).

Disclaimer and notes

Disclaimer and note:  URL’s submitted for inclusion on this site will be reviewed for consideration and to be in generally accepted good taste in regards to the theme of this site.  Best effort has been made to validate and verify the URLs that appear on this page and web site however they are subject to change. The author and/or maintainer’s) of this page and web site make no endorsement to and assume no responsibility for the URLs and their content that are listed on this page.

What this all means

The result of a green and virtual data center is that of a flexible, agile, resilient, scalable information factory that is also economical, productive, efficient, productive as well as sustainable.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

Posted on

January 2015 Server StorageIO Industry Trends Newsletter

Volume 15, Issue I

Hello and welcome to this January 2015 Server and StorageIO update newsletter. Its 2015 and the new year is off and running picking up where 2014 left off. January is typically a relatively quiet month when it comes to technology announcements and other industry activity. However January is also time where there is a lot going on behind the scenes. This means that there are many things to watch for in the coming months, weeks or perhaps even days.

Commentary In The News

StorageIO news

Following are some Server and StorageIO industry trends perspectives comments that have appeared in various venues. In case you missed it, Box recently did their IPO and here are some perspectives over at SaaS In the Enterprise prior to the IPO.

Over at Enterprise Storage Forum I have some perspectives on High Performance Compute (HPC) aka High Productivity Compute along with big data and object storage in the Lustre buying guide.

Also over at Enterprise Storage Forum some tips and comments on data storage benchmarking guide. Meanwhile over at  InfoStor check see 9 Storage Startups to Watch. Search SolidState Storage has some perspectives on NexGen Storage ioControl following SanDisk spinout and over at Processor some comments on avoiding common mistakes with virtualization. View more trends comments here

Tips and Articles

Cloud storage: Is It All About Cost?

Is cloud storage all about removing cost, cost cutting, free storage? Or perhaps even getting something else in addition to free storage?

You might ask: what type of cloud storage am I referring to? That’s a great question. After all, there are many types or categories of public cloud storage services, not to mention private and hybrid options. There are cloud storage services for consumers to save and share their photos, videos, music and other documents to. Then there is business and enterprise file, document, object and collaboration cloud storage options. Read the entire article here.

View recent as well as past tips and articles here

Server StorageIOblog posts

Recent StorageIOblog posts include:

View other recent as well as past blog posts here

In This Issue

  • Industry Trends Perspectives
  • Commentary in the news
  • Server StorageIO Tips and Articles
  • Server StorageIO blog posts

    • Events & Activities

    May 4-6, 2015 EMCworld Las Vegas
    April 29, 2015 Interop Las Vegas
    April 12 -13, 2015 NAB Las Vegas
    March 3, 2015 – TBA (St. Paul)
    Feb 18, 2015 Usenix FAST Santa Clara

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    Webinars

    December 11, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Performance
    December 10, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Decision Making
    December 9, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Virtual Server and Storage Decision Making
    December 3, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Data Protection Modernization
    November 13 9AM PT – BrightTalk
    Software Defined Storage

    Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    From Server StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Intel NUC nick knack notes and review

    Intel nuc server storage I/O
    Intel nuc server storage I/O ports
    Intel Nuc

    This Server StorageIO lab review looks at  Intel NUC for virtual, physical and software defined storage networking. Read more about Intel Nuc here.

    View other StorageIO lab and reports here.

    Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:
    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Enjoy this edition of the Server and StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcasts along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    DIY converged server software defined storage on a budget using Lenovo TS140

    Attention DIY Converged Server Storage Bargain Shoppers

    Software defined storage on a budget with Lenovo TS140

    server storage I/O trends

    Recently I put together a two-part series of some server storage I/O items to get a geek for a gift (read part I here and part II here) that also contain items that can be used for accessorizing servers such as the Lenovo ThinkServer TS140.

    Image via Lenovo.com

    Likewise I have done reviews of the Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 in the past which included me liking them and buying some (read the reviews here and here), along with a review of the larger TD340 here.

    Why is this of interest

    Do you need or want to do a Do It Yourself (DIY) build of a small server compute cluster, or a software defined storage cluster (e.g. scale-out), or perhaps a converged storage for VMware VSAN, Microsoft SOFS or something else?

    Do you need a new server, second or third server, or expand a cluster, create a lab or similar and want the ability to tailor your system without shopping or a motherboard, enclosure, power supply and so forth?

    Are you a virtualization or software defined person looking to create a small VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) needing three or more servers to build a proof of concept or personal lab system?

    Then the TS140 could be a fit for you.

    storage I/O Lenovo TS140
    Image via StorageIOlabs, click to see review

    Why the Lenovo TS140 now?

    Recently I have seen a lot of site traffic on my site with people viewing my reviews of the Lenovo TS140 of which I have a few. In addition have got questions from people via comments section as well as elsewhere about the TS140 and while shopping at Amazon.com for some other things, noticed that there were some good value deals on different TS140 models.

    I tend to buy the TS140 models that are bare bones having power supply, enclosure, CD/DVD, USB ports, power supply and fan, processor and minimal amount of DRAM memory. For processors mine have the Intel E3-1225 v3 which are quad-core and that have various virtualization assist features (e.g. good for VMware and other hypervisors).

    What I saw on Amazon the other day (also elsewhere) were some Intel i3-4130 dual core based systems (these do not have all the virtualization features, just the basics) in a bare configuration (e.g. no Hard Disk Drive (HDD), 4GB DRAM, processor, mother board, power supply and fan, LAN port and USB with a price of around $220 USD (your price may vary depending on timing, venue, prime or other membership and other factors). Not bad for a system that you can tailor to your needs. However what also caught my eye were the TS140 models that have the Intel E3-1225 v3 (e.g. quad core, 3.2Ghz) processor matching the others I have with a price of around $330 USD including shipping (your price will vary depending on venue and other factors).

    What are some things to be aware of?

    Some caveats of this solution approach include:

    • There are probably other similar types of servers, either by price, performance, or similar
    • Compare apples to apples, e.g. same or better processor, memory, OS, PCIe speed and type of slots, LAN ports
    • Not as robust of a solution as those you can find costing tens of thousands of dollars (or more)
    • A DIY system which means you select the other hardware pieces and handle the service and support of them
    • Hardware platform approach where you choose and supply your software of choice
    • For entry-level environments who have floor-space or rack-space to accommodate towers vs. rack-space or other alternatives
    • Software agnostic Based on basically an empty server chassis (with power supplies, motherboard, power supplies, PCIe slots and other things)
    • Possible candidate for smaller SMB (Small Medium Business), ROBO (Remote Office Branch Office), SOHO (Small Office Home Office) or labs that are looking for DIY
    • A starting place and stimulus for thinking about doing different things

    What could you do with this building block (e.g. server)

    Create a single or multi-server based system for

    • Virtual Server Infrastructure (VSI) including KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, Xen among others
    • Object storage
    • Software Defined Storage including Datacore, Microsoft SOFS, Openstack, Starwind, VMware VSAN, various XFS and ZFS among others
    • Private or hybrid cloud including using Openstack among other software tools
    • Create a hadoop big data analytics cluster or grid
    • Establish a video or media server, use for gaming or a backup (data protection) server
    • Update or expand your lab and test environment
    • General purpose SMB, ROBO or SOHO single or clustered server

    VMware VSAN server storageIO example

    What you need to know

    Like some other servers in this class, you need to pay attention to what it is that you are ordering, check out the various reviews, comments and questions as well as verify the make, model along with configuration. For example what is included and what is not included, warranty, return policy among other things. In the case of some of the TS140 models, they do not have a HDD, OS, keyboard, monitor, mouse along with different types of processors and memory. Not all the processors are the same, pay attention, visit the Intel Ark site to look up a specific processor configuration to see if it fits your needs as well as visit the hardware compatibility list (HCL) for the software that you are planning to use. Note that these should be best practices regardless of make, model, type or vendor for server, storage, I/O networking hardware and software.

    What you will need

    This list assumes that you have obtained a model without a HDD, keyboard, video, mouse or operating system (OS) installed

    • Update your BIOS if applicable, check the Lenovo site
    • Enable virtualization and other advanced features via your BIOS
    • Software such as an Operating System (OS), hypervisor or other distribution (load via USB or CD/DVD if present)
    • SSD, SSHD/HHDD, HDD or USB flash drive for installing OS or other software
    • Keyboard, video, mouse (or a KVM switch)

    What you might want to add (have it your way)

    • Keyboard, video mouse or a KVM switch (See gifts for a geek here)
    • Additional memory
    • Graphics card, GPU or PCIe riser
    • Additional SSD, SSHD/HHDD or HDD for storage
    • Extra storage I/O and networking ports

    Extra networking ports

    You can easily add some GbE (or faster ports) including use the PCIe x1 slot, or use one of the other slots for a quad port GbE (or faster), not to mention get some InfiniBand single or dual port cards such as the Mellanox Connectx II or Connect III that support QDR and can run in IBA or 10GbE modes. If you only have two or three servers in a cluster, grid, ring configuration you can run point to point topologies using InfiniBand (and some other network interfaces) without using a switch, however you decide if you need or want switched or non-switched (I have a switch). Note that with VMware (and perhaps other hypervisors or OS) you may need to update the drives for the Realtek GbE LAN on Motherboard port (see links below).

    Extra storage ports

    For extra storage space capacity (and performance) you can easily add PCIe G2 or G3 HBAs (SAS, SATA, FC, FCoE, CNA, UTA, IBA for SRP, etc) or RAID cards among others. Depending on your choice of cards, you can then attach to more internal storage, external storage or some combination with different adapters, cables, interposers and connectivity options. For example I have used TS140s with PCIe Gen 3 12Gbs SAS HBAs attached to 12Gbs SAS SSDs (and HDDs) with the ability to drive performance to see what those devices are capable of doing.

    TS140 Hardware Defined My Way

    As an example of how a TS140 can be configured, using one of the base E3-1224 v3 models with 4GB RAM, no HDD (e.g around $330 USD, your price will vary), add a 4TB Seagate HDD (or two or three) for around $140 USD each (your price will vary), add a 480GB SATA SSD for around $340 USD (your price will vary) with those attached to the internal SATA ports. To bump up network performance, how about a Mellanox Connectx II dual port QDR IBA/10GbE card for around $140 USD (your price will vary), plus around $65 USD for QSFP cable (you your price will vary), and some extra memory (use what you have or shop around) and you have a platform ready to go for around or under $1,000 USD. Add some more internal or external disks, bump up the memory, put in some extra network adapters and your price will go up a bit, however think about what you can have for a robust not so little system. For you VMware vgeeks, think about the proof of concept VSAN that you can put together, granted you will have to do some DIY items.

    Some TS140 resources

    Lenovo TS140 resources include

    • TS140 StorageIOlab review (here and here)
    • TS140 Lenovo ordering website
    • TS140 Data and Spec Sheet (PDF here)
    • Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 Manual (PDF here) and (PDF here)
    • Intel E3-1200 v3 processors capabilities (Web page here)
    • Enabling Virtualization Technology (VT) in TS140 BIOS (Press F1) (Read here)
    • Enabling Intel NIC (82579LM) GbE with VMware (Link to user forum and a blog site here)

    Image via Lenovo.com

    What this all means

    Like many servers in its category (price, capabilities, abilities, packaging) you can do a lot of different things with them, as well as hardware define with accessories, or use your own software. Depending on how you end how hardware defining the TS140 with extra memory, HDDs, SSDs, adapters or other accessories and software your cost will vary. However you can also put together a pretty robust system without breaking your budget while meeting different needs.

    Is this for everybody? Nope

    Is this for more than a lab, experimental, hobbyist, gamer? Sure, with some caveats Is this apples to apples comparison vs. some other solutions including VSANs? Nope, not even close, maybe apples to oranges.

    Do I like the TS140? Yup, starting with a review I did about a year ago, I liked it so much I bought one, then another, then some more.

    Are these the only servers I have, use or like? Nope, I also have systems from HP and Dell as well as test drive and review others

    Why do I like the TS140? It’s a value for some things which means that while affordable (not to be confused with cheap) it has features, salability and ability to be both hardware defined for what I want or need to use them as, along with software define them to be different things. Key for me is the PCIe Gen 3 support with multiple slots (and types of slots), reasonable amount of memory, internal housing for 3.5" and 2.5" drives that can attach to on-board SATA ports, media device (CD/DVD) if needed, or remove to use for more HDDs and SSDs. In other words, it’s a platform that instead of shopping for the motherboard, an enclosure, power supply, processor and related things I get the basics, then configure, and reconfigure as needed.

    Another reason I like the TS140 is that I get to have the server basically my way, in that I do not have to order it with a smallest number of HDDs, or that it comes with an OS, more memory than needed or other things that I may or may not be able to use. Granted I need to supply the extra memory, HDDs, SSDs, PCIe adapters and network ports along with software, however for me that’s not too much of an issue.

    What don’t I like about the TS140? You can read more about my thoughts on the TS140 in my review here, or its bigger sibling the TD340 here, however I would like to see more memory slots for scaling up. Granted for what these cost, it’s just as easy to scale-out and after all, that’s what a lot of software defined storage prefers these days (e.g. scale-out).

    The TS140 is a good platform for many things, granted not for everything, that’s why like storage, networking and other technologies there are different server options for various needs. Exercise caution when doing apples to oranges comparison on price alone, compare what you are getting in terms of processor type (and its functionality), expandable memory, PCIe speed, type and number of slots, LAN connectivity and other features to meet your needs or requirements. Also keep in mind that some systems might be more expensive that include a keyboard, HDD with an OS installed that if you can use those components, then they have value and should be factored into your cost, benefit, return on investment.

    And yes, I just added a few more TS140s that join other recent additions to the server storageIO lab resources…

    Anybody want to guess what I will be playing with among other things during the up coming holiday season?

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    December 2014 Server StorageIO Newsletter

    December 2014

    Hello and welcome to this December Server and StorageIO update newsletter.

    Seasons Greetings

    Seasons greetings

    Commentary In The News

    StorageIO news

    Following are some StorageIO industry trends perspectives comments that have appeared in various venues. Cloud conversations continue to be popular including concerns about privacy, security and availability. Over at BizTech Magazine there are some comments about cloud and ROI. Some comments on AWS and Google SSD services can be viewed at SearchAWS. View other trends comments here

    Tips and Articles

    View recent as well as past tips and articles here

    StorageIOblog posts

    Recent StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    In This Issue

  • Industry Trends Perspectives
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts

    • Events & Activities

    View other recent and upcoming events here

    Webinars

    December 11, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Performance

    December 10, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Server & Storage I/O Decision Making

    December 9, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Virtual Server and Storage Decision Making

    December 3, 2014 – BrightTalk
    Data Protection Modernization

    Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    StarWind Virtual SAN for Microsoft SOFS

    May require registration
    This looks at the shared storage needs of SMB’s and ROBO’s leveraging Microsoft Scale-Out File Server (SOFS). Focus is on Microsoft Windows Server 2012, Server Message Block version (SMB) 3.0, SOFS and StarWind Virtual SAN management software

    View additional reports and lab reviews here.

    Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:
    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageio.com/ssd
    storageio.com/ssd

    Enjoy this edition of the Server and StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcasts along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Seasons greetings 2014

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Server Storage I/O Cables Connectors Chargers & other Geek Gifts

    Server Storage I/O Cables Connectors Chargers & other Geek Gifts

    server storage I/O trends

    This is part one of a two part series for what to get a geek for a gift, read part two here.

    It is that time of the year when annual predictions are made for the upcoming year, including those that will be repeated next year or that were also made last year.

    It’s also the time of the year to get various projects wrapped up, line up new activities, get the book-keeping things ready for year-end processing and taxes, as well as other things.

    It’s also that time of the year to do some budget and project planning including upgrades, replacements, enhancements while balancing an over-subscribed holiday party schedule some of you may have.

    Lets not forget getting ready for vacations, perhaps time off from work with some time upgrading your home lab or other projects.

    Then there are the gift lists or trying to figure out what to get that difficult to shop for person particular geek’s who may have everything, or want the latest and greatest that others have, or something their peers don’t have yet.

    Sure I have a DJI Phantom II on my wish list, however also have other things on my needs list (e.g. what I really need and want vs. what would be fun to wish for).

    DJI Phantom helicopter drone
    Image via DJI.com, click on image to learn more and compare models

    So here are some things for the geek or may have everything or is up on having the latest and greatest, yet forgot or didn’t know about some of these things.

    Not to mention some of these might seem really simple and low-cost, think of them like a Lego block or erector set part where your imagination will be your boundary how to use them. Also, most if not all of these are budget friendly particular if you shop around.

    Replace a CD/DVD with 4 x 2.5″ HDD’s or SSD’s

    So you need to add some 2.5" SAS or SATA HDD’s, SSD’s, HHDD’s/SSHD’s to your server for supporting your VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, Xen, OpenStack, Hadoop or legacy *nix or Windows environment or perhaps gaming system. Challenge is that you are out of disk drive bay slots and you want things neatly organized vs. a rat’s nest of cables hanging out of your system. No worries assuming your server has an empty media bay (e.g. those 5.25" slots where CDs/DVDs or really old HDD’s go), or if you can give up the CD/DVD, then use that bay and its power connector to add ones of these. This is a 4 x 2.5" SAS and SATA drive bay that has a common power connector (molex male) with each drive bay having its own SATA drive connection. By each drive having its own SATA connection you can map the drives to an on-board available SATA port attached to a SAS or SATA controller, or attach an available port on a RAID adapter to the ports using a cable such as small form factor (SFF) 8087 to SATA.

    sas storage enclosuresas sata storage enclosure
    (Left) Rear view with Molex power and SATA cables (Right) front view

    I have a few of these in different systems and what I like about them is that they support different drive speeds, plus they will accept a SAS drive where many enclosures in this category only support SATA. Once you mount your 2.5" HDD or SSD using screws, you can hot swap (requires controller and OS support) the drives and move them between other similar enclosures as needed. The other thing I like is that there are front indicator lights as well as by each drive having its own separate connection, you can attach some of the drives to a RAID adapter while others connected to on-board SATA ports. Oh, and you can also have different speeds of drives as well.

    Power connections

    Depending on the type of your server, you may have Molex, SATA or some other type of power connections. You can use different power connection cables to go from one type (Molex) to another, create a connection for two devices, create an extension to reach hard to get to mounting locations.

    Warning and disclosure note, keep in mind how much power you are drawing when attaching devices to not cause an electrical or fire hazard, follow manufactures instructions and specification doing so at your own risk! After all, Just like Clark Grizzwald in National Lampoon Christmas Vacation who found you could attach extension cord to splitters to splitters and fan-out to have many lights attached, you don’t want to cause a fire or blackout when you plug to many drives in.


    National Lampoon Christmas Vacation

    Measuring Power

    Ok so you do not want to do a Clark Grizzwald (see above video) and overload a power circuit, or perhaps you simply want to know how many watts, amps or quality of your voltage is.

    There are many types of power meters along with various prices, some even have interfaces where you can grab event data to correlate with server storage I/O networking performance to do things such as IOP’s per watt among other metrics. Speaking of IOP’s per watt, check out the SNIA Emerald site where they have some good tools including a benchmark script that uses Vdbench to drive hot band workload (e.g. basically kick the crap out of a storage system).

    Back to power meters, I like the Kill A Watt series of meters as they give good info about amps, volts, power quality. I have these plugged into outlets so I can see how much power is being used by the battery backup units (BBU) aka UPS that also serve as power surge filters. If needed I can move these further downstream to watch the power intake of a specific server, storage, network or other device.

    Kill A Watt Power meter

    Standby and backup power

    Electrical power surge strips should be a given or considered common sense, however what is or should be common sense should be repeated so that it remains common sense, you should be using power surge strips or other devices.

    Standby, UPS and BBU

    For most situations a good surge suppressor will cover short power transients.

    APC power strips and battery backup
    Image via APC and model similar to those that I have

    For slightly longer power outages of a few seconds to minutes, that’s where battery backup up (BBU) units that also have surge suppression comes into play. There are many types, sizes with various features to meet your needs and budget. I have several of theses in a couple of different sizes not only for servers, storage and networking equipment (including some WiFi access points, routers, etc), I also have them for home things such as satellite DVR’s. However not everything needs to stay on while others simply need to stay on long-enough in order to shutdown manually or via automated power off sequences.

    Alternate Power Generation

    Generators are not just for the rich and famous or large data center, like other technologies they are available in different sizes, power capacity, fuel sources, manual or automated among other things.

    kohler residential generator
    Image via Kohler Power similar to model that I have

    Note that even with a typical generator there will be a time gap from the time power goes off until the generator starts, stabilizes and you have good power. That’s where the BBU and UPS mentioned above comes into play to bridge those time gaps which in my cases is about 25-30 seconds. Btw, knowing how much power your technology is drawing using tools such as the Kill A Watt is part of the planning process to avoid surprises.

    What about Solar Power

    Yup, whether it is to fit in and be green, or simply to get some electrical power when or where it is not needed to charge a battery or power some device, these small solar power devices are very handy.

    solar charger
    Image via Amazon.com
    solar battery charger
    Image via Amazon.com

    For example you can get or easily make an adapter to charge laptops, cell phones or even power them for normal use (check manufactures information on power usage, Amps and Voltage draws among other warnings to prevent fire and other things). Btw, not only are these handy for computer related things, they also work great for keeping batteries on my fishing boat charged so that I have my fish finder and other electronics, just saying.

    Fire suppression

    How about a new or updated smoke and fire detection alarm monitor, as well as fire extinguisher for the geek’s software defined hardware that runs on power (electrical or battery)?

    The following is from the site Fire Extinguisher 101 where you can learn more about different types of suppression technologies.

    Image via Fire Extinguisher 101
    • Class A extinguishers are for ordinary combustible materials such as paper, wood, cardboard, and most plastics. The numerical rating on these types of extinguishers indicates the amount of water it holds and the amount of fire it can extinguish. Geometric symbol (green triangle)
    • Class B fires involve flammable or combustible liquids such as gasoline, kerosene, grease and oil. The numerical rating for class B extinguishers indicates the approximate number of square feet of fire it can extinguish. Geometric symbol (red square)
    • Class C fires involve electrical equipment, such as appliances, wiring, circuit breakers and outlets. Never use water to extinguish class C fires – the risk of electrical shock is far too great! Class C extinguishers do not have a numerical rating. The C classification means the extinguishing agent is non-conductive. Geometric symbol (blue circle)
    • Class D fire extinguishers are commonly found in a chemical laboratory. They are for fires that involve combustible metals, such as magnesium, titanium, potassium and sodium. These types of extinguishers also have no numerical rating, nor are they given a multi-purpose rating – they are designed for class D fires only. Geometric symbol (Yellow Decagon)
    • Class K fire extinguishers are for fires that involve cooking oils, trans-fats, or fats in cooking appliances and are typically found in restaurant and cafeteria kitchens. Geometric symbol (black hexagon)

    Wrap up for part I

    This wraps up part I of what to get a geek V2014, continue reading part II here.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Data Storage Tape Update V2014, Its Still Alive

    Data Storage Tape Update V2014, It’s Still Alive

    server storage I/O trends

    A year or so ago I did a piece tape summit resources. Despite being declared dead for decades, and will probably stay being declared dead for years to come, magnetic tape is in fact still alive being used by some organizations, granted its role is changing while the technology still evolves.

    Here is the memo I received today from the PR folks of the Tape Storage Council (e.g. tape vendors marketing consortium) and for simplicity (mine), I’m posting it here for you to read in its entirety vs. possibly in pieces elsewhere. Note that this is basically a tape status and collection of marketing and press release talking points, however you can get an idea of the current messaging, who is using tape and technology updates.

    Tape Data Storage in 2014 and looking towards 2015

    True to the nature of magnetic tape as a data storage medium, this is not a low latency small post, rather a large high-capacity bulk post or perhaps all you need to know about tape for now, or until next year. Otoh, if you are a tape fan, you can certainly take the memo from the tape folks, as well as visit their site for more info.

    From the tape storage council industry trade group:

    Today the Tape Storage Council issued its annual memo to highlight the current trends, usages and technology innovations occurring within the tape storage industry. The Tape Storage Council includes representatives of BDT, Crossroads Systems, FUJIFILM, HP, IBM, Imation, Iron Mountain, Oracle, Overland Storage, Qualstar, Quantum, REB Storage Systems, Recall, Spectra Logic, Tandberg Data and XpresspaX.  

    Data Growth and Technology Innovations Fuel Tape’s Future
    Tape Addresses New Markets as Capacity, Performance, and Functionality Reach New Levels

    Abstract
    For the past decade, the tape industry has been re-architecting itself and the renaissance is well underway. Several new and important technologies for both LTO (Linear Tape Open) and enterprise tape products have yielded unprecedented cartridge capacity increases, much longer media life, improved bit error rates, and vastly superior economics compared to any previous tape or disk technology. This progress has enabled tape to effectively address many new data intensive market opportunities in addition to its traditional role as a backup device such as archive, Big Data, compliance, entertainment and surveillance. Clearly disk technology has been advancing, but the progress in tape has been even greater over the past 10 years. Today’s modern tape technology is nothing like the tape of the past.

    The Growth in Tape  
    Demand for tape is being fueled by unrelenting data growth, significant technological advancements, tape’s highly favorable economics, the growing requirements to maintain access to data “forever” emanating from regulatory, compliance or governance requirements, and the big data demand for large amounts of data to be analyzed and monetized in the future. The Digital Universe study suggests that the world’s information is doubling every two years and much of this data is most cost-effectively stored on tape.

    Enterprise tape has reached an unprecedented 10 TB native capacity with data rates reaching 360 MB/sec. Enterprise tape libraries can scale beyond one exabyte. Enterprise tape manufacturers IBM and Oracle StorageTek have signaled future cartridge capacities far beyond 10 TBs with no limitations in sight.  Open systems users can now store more than 300 Blu-ray quality movies with the LTO-6 2.5 TB cartridge. In the future, an LTO-10 cartridge will hold over 14,400 Blu-ray movies. Nearly 250 million LTO tape cartridges have been shipped since the format’s inception. This equals over 100,000 PB of data protected and retained using LTO Technology. The innovative active archive solution combining tape with low-cost NAS storage and LTFS is gaining momentum for open systems users.

    Recent Announcements and Milestones
    Tape storage is addressing many new applications in today’s modern data centers while offering welcome relief from constant IT budget pressures. Tape is also extending its reach to the cloud as a cost-effective deep archive service. In addition, numerous analyst studies confirm the TCO for tape is much lower than disk when it comes to backup and data archiving applications. See TCO Studies section below.

    • On Sept. 16, 2013 Oracle Corp announced the StorageTek T10000D enterprise tape drive. Features of the T10000D include an 8.5 TB native capacity and data rate of 252 MB/s native. The T10000D is backward read compatible with all three previous generations of T10000 tape drives.
    • On Jan. 16, 2014 Fujifilm Recording Media USA, Inc. reported it has manufactured over 100 million LTO Ultrium data cartridges since its release of the first generation of LTO in 2000. This equates to over 53 thousand petabytes (53 exabytes) of storage and more than 41 million miles of tape, enough to wrap around the globe 1,653 times.
    • April 30, 2014, Sony Corporation independently developed a soft magnetic under layer with a smooth interface using sputter deposition, created a nano-grained magnetic layer with fine magnetic particles and uniform crystalline orientation. This layer enabled Sony to successfully demonstrate the world’s highest areal recording density for tape storage media of 148 GB/in2. This areal density would make it possible to record more than 185 TB of data per data cartridge.
    • On May 19, 2014 Fujifilm in conjunction with IBM successfully demonstrated a record areal data density of 85.9 Gb/in2 on linear magnetic particulate tape using Fujifilm’s proprietary NANOCUBIC™ and Barium Ferrite (BaFe) particle technologies. This breakthrough in recording density equates to a standard LTO cartridge capable of storing up to 154 terabytes of uncompressed data, making it 62 times greater than today’s current LTO-6 cartridge capacity and projects a long and promising future for tape growth.
    • On Sept. 9, 2014 IBM announced LTFS LE version 2.1.4 4 extending LTFS (Linear Tape File System) tape library support.
    • On Sept. 10, 2014 the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), HP, IBM and Quantum, announced an extended roadmap which now includes LTO generations 9 and 10. The new generation guidelines call for compressed capacities of 62.5 TB for LTO-9 and 120 TB for generation LTO-10 and include compressed transfer rates of up to 1,770 MB/second for LTO-9 and a 2,750 MB/second for LTO-10. Each new generation will include read-and-write backwards compatibility with the prior generation as well as read compatibility with cartridges from two generations prior to protect investments and ease tape conversion and implementation.
    • On Oct. 6, 2014 IBM announced the TS1150 enterprise drive. Features of the TS1150 include a native data rate of up to 360 MB/sec versus the 250 MB/sec native data rate of the predecessor TS1140 and a native cartridge capacity of 10 TB compared to 4 TB on the TS1140. LTFS support was included.
    • On Nov. 6, 2014, HP announced a new release of StoreOpen Automation that delivers a solution for using LTFS in automation environments with Windows OS, available as a free download. This version complements their already existing support for Mac and Linux versions to help simplify integration of tape libraries to archiving solutions.

    Significant Technology Innovations Fuel Tape’s Future
    Development and manufacturing investment in tape library, drive, media and management software has effectively addressed the constant demand for improved reliability, higher capacity, power efficiency, ease of use and the lowest cost per GB of any storage solution. Below is a summary of tape’s value proposition followed by key metrics for each:

    • Tape drive reliability has surpassed disk drive reliability
    • Tape cartridge capacity (native) growth is on an unprecedented trajectory
    • Tape has a faster device data rate than disk
    • Tape has a much longer media life than any other digital storage medium
    • Tape’s functionality and ease of use is now greatly enhanced with LTFS
    • Tape requires significantly less energy consumption than any other digital storage technology
    • Tape storage has  a much lower acquisition cost and TCO than disk

    Reliability. Tape reliability levels have surpassed HDDs. Reliability levels for tape exceeds that of the most reliable disk drives by one to three orders of magnitude. The BER (Bit Error Rate – bits read per hard error) for enterprise tape is rated at 1×1019 and 1×1017 for LTO tape. This compares to 1×1016 for the most reliable enterprise Fibre Channel disk drive.

    Capacity and Data Rate. LTO-6 cartridges provide 2.5 TB capacity and more than double the compressed capacity of the preceding LTO-5 drive with a 14% data rate performance boost to 160 MB/sec. Enterprise tape has reached 8.5 TB native capacity and 252 MB/sec on the Oracle StorageTek T10000D and 10 TB native capacity and 360 MB/sec on the IBM TS1150. Tape cartridge capacities are expected to grow at unprecedented rates for the foreseeable future.

    Media Life. Manufacturers specifications indicate that enterprise and LTO tape media has a life span of 30 years or more while the average tape drive will be deployed 7 to 10 years before replacement. By comparison, the average disk drive is operational 3 to 5 years before replacement.

    LTFS Changes Rules for Tape Access. Compared to previous proprietary solutions, LTFS is an open tape format that stores files in application-independent, self-describing fashion, enabling the simple interchange of content across multiple platforms and workflows. LTFS is also being deployed in several innovative “Tape as NAS” active archive solutions that combine the cost benefits of tape with the ease of use and fast access times of NAS. The SNIA LTFS Technical Working Group has been formed to broaden cross–industry collaboration and continued technical development of the LTFS specification.

    TCOStudies. Tape’s widening cost advantage compared to other storage mediums makes it the most cost-effective technology for long-term data retention. The favorable economics (TCO, low energy consumption, reduced raised floor) and massive scalability have made tape the preferred medium for managing vast volumes of data. Several tape TCO studies are publicly available and the results consistently confirm a significant TCO advantage for tape compared to disk solutions.

    According to the Brad Johns Consulting Group, a TCO study for an LTFS-based ‘Tape as NAS’ solution totaled $1.1M compared with $7.0M for a disk-based unified storage solution.  This equates to a savings of over $5.9M over a 10-year period, which is more than 84 percent less than the equivalent amount for a storage system built on a 4 TB hard disk drive unified storage system.  From a slightly different perspective, this is a TCO savings of over $2,900/TB of data. Source: Johns, B. “A New Approach to Lowering the Cost of Storing File Archive Information,”.

    Another comprehensive TCO study by ESG (Enterprise Strategies Group) comparing an LTO-5 tape library system with a low-cost SATA disk system for backup using de-duplication (best case for disk) shows that disk deduplication has a 2-4x higher TCO than the tape system for backup over a 5 year period. The study revealed that disk has a TCO of 15x higher than tape for long-term data archiving.

    Select Case Studies Highlight Tape and Active Archive Solutions
    CyArk Is a non-profit foundation focused on the digital preservation of cultural heritage sites including places such as Mt. Rushmore, and Pompeii. CyArk predicted that their data archive would grow by 30 percent each year for the foreseeable future reaching one to two petabytes in five years. They needed a storage solution that was secure, scalable, and more cost-effective to provide the longevity required for these important historical assets. To meet this challenge CyArk implemented an active archive solution featuring LTO and LTFS technologies.

    Dream Works Animation a global Computer Graphic (CG) animation studio has implemented a reliable, cost-effective and scalable active archive solution to safeguard a 2 PB portfolio of finished movies and graphics, supporting a long-term asset preservation strategy. The studio’s comprehensive, tiered and converged active archive architecture, which spans software, disk and tape, saves the company time, money and reduces risk.

    LA Kings of the NHL rely extensively on digital video assets for marketing activities with team partners and for its broadcast affiliation with Fox Sports. Today, the Kings save about 200 GB of video per game for an 82 game regular season and are on pace to generate about 32-35 TB of new data per season. The King’s chose to implement Fujifilm’s Dternity NAS active archive appliance, an open LTFS based architecture. The Kings wanted an open source archiving solution which could outlast its original hardware while maintaining data integrity. Today with Dternity and LTFS, the Kings don’t have to decide what data to keep because they are able to cost-effectively save everything they might need in the future. 

    McDonald’s primary challenge was to create a digital video workflow that streamlines the management and distribution of their global video assets for their video production and post-production environment. McDonald’s implemented the Spectra T200 tape library with LTO-6 providing 250 TB of McDonald’s video production storage. Nightly, incremental backup jobs store their media assets into separate disk and LTO- 6 storage pools for easy backup, tracking and fast retrieval. This system design allows McDonald’s to effectively separate and manage their assets through the use of customized automation and data service policies.

    NCSA employs an Active Archive solution providing 100 percent of the nearline storage for the NCSA Blue Waters supercomputer, which is one of the world’s largest active file repositories stored on high capacity, highly reliable enterprise tape media. Using an active archive system along with enterprise tape and RAIT (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Tape) eliminates the need to duplicate tape data, which has led to dramatic cost savings.

    Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) is a leading center for neuroscience research.  QBI’s research focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate brain function to help develop new treatments for neurological and mental disorders.  QBI’s storage system has to scale extensively to store, protect, and access tens of terabytes of data daily to support cutting-edge research.  QBI choose an Oracle solution consisting of Oracle’s StorageTek SL3000 modular tape libraries with StorageTek T10000 enterprise tape drives.   The Oracle solution improved QBI’s ability to grow, attract world-leading scientists and meet stringent funding conditions.

    Looking Ahead to 2015 and Beyond
    The role tape serves in today’s modern data centers is expanding as IT executives and cloud service providers address new applications for tape that leverage its significant operational and cost advantages. This recognition is driving investment in new tape technologies and innovations with extended roadmaps, and it is expanding tape’s profile from its historical role in data backup to one that includes long-term archiving requiring cost-effective access to enormous quantities of stored data. Given the current and future trajectory of tape technology, data intensive markets such as big data, broadcast and entertainment, archive, scientific research, oil and gas exploration, surveillance, cloud, and HPC are expected to become significant beneficiaries of tape’s continued progress. Clearly the tremendous innovation, compelling value proposition and development activities demonstrate tape technology is not sitting still; expect this promising trend to continue in 2015 and beyond. 

    Visit the Tape Storage Council at tapestorage.org

    What this means and summary

    Like it not tape is still alive being used along with the technology evolving with new enhancements as outlined above.

    Good to see the tape folks doing some marketing to get their story told and heard for those who are still interested.

    Does that mean I still use tape?

    Nope, I stopped using tape for local backups and archives well over a decade ago using disk to disk and disk to cloud.

    Does that mean I believe that tape is dead?

    Nope, I still believe that for some organizations and some usage scenarios it makes good sense, however like with most data storage related technologies, it’s not a one size or type of technology fits everything scenario value proposition.

    On a related note for cloud and object storage, visit www.objectstoragecenter.com

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

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