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GDPR goes into effect May 25 2018 Are You Ready?

server storage I/O trends

GDPR goes into effect May 25 2018 Are You Ready?

The new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) go into effect in a year on May 25 2018 are you ready?

Why Become GDPR Aware

If your initial response is that you are not in Europe and do not need to be concerned about GDPR you might want to step back and review that thought. While it is possible that some organizations may not be affected by GDPR in Europe directly, there might be indirect considerations. For example, GDPR, while focused on Europe, has ties to other initiatives in place or being planned for elsewhere in the world. Likewise unlike earlier regulatory compliance that tended to focus on specific industries such as healthcare (HIPPA and HITECH) or financial (SARBOX, Dodd/Frank among others), these new regulations can be more far-reaching.

GDPR Looking Beyond Compliance

Taking a step back, GDPR, as its name implies, is about general data protection including how information is protected, preserved, secured and served. This also includes taking safeguards to logically protect data with passwords, encryption among other techniques. Another dimension of GDPR is reporting and ability to track who has accessed what information (including when), as well as simply knowing what data you have.

What this means is that GDPR impacts users from consumers of social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin among others, to cloud storage and related services, as well as traditional applications. In other words, GDPR is not just for finance, healthcare, it is more far-reaching making sure you know what data exists, and taking adequate steps to protect.

There is a lot more to discuss of GDPR in Europe as well as what else is being done in other parts of the world. For now being aware of initiatives such as GDPR and its broader scope impact besides traditional compliance is important. With these new initiatives, the focus expands from the compliance office or officers to the data protection office and data protection officer whose scope is to protect, preserve, secure and serve data along with associated information.

GDPR and Microsoft Environments

As part of generating awareness and help planning, I’m going to be presenting a free webinar produced by Redmond Magazine sponsored by Quest (who will also be a co-presenter) on June 22, 2017 (7AM PT). The title of the webinar is GDPR Compliance Planning for Microsoft Environments.

This webinar looks at the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its impact on Microsoft environments. Specifically, we look at how GDPR along with other future compliance directives impact Microsoft cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, as well as what you can do to be ready before the May 25, 2018 deadline. Join us for this discussion of what you need to know to plan and carry out a strategy to help address GDPR compliance regulations for Microsoft environments.

What you will learn during this discussion:

  • Why GDPR and other regulations impact your environment
  • How to assess and find compliance risks
  • How to discover who has access to sensitive resources
  • Importance of real-time auditing to monitor and alert on user access activity

This webinar applies to business professionals responsible for strategy, planning and policy decision-making for Microsoft environments along with associated applications. This includes security, compliance, data protection, system admins, architects and other IT professionals.

What This All Means

Now is the time to start planning, preparing for GDPR if you have not done so and need to, as well as becoming more generally aware of it and other initiatives. One of the key takeaways is that while the word compliance is involved, there is much more to GDPR than just compliance as we have seen in the part. With GDPR and other initiatives data protection becomes the focus including privacy, protect, preserve, secure, serve as well as manage, have insight, awareness along with associated reporting. Join me and Quest on June 22, 2017 7AM PT for the webinar GDPR Compliance Planning for Microsoft Environments to learn more.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Watch for the spring 2017 release of his new book "Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials" (CRC Press).

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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved.

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Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD StorgeIO lab review

Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD StorgeIO lab review

This is the first post of a two part series, read the second post here.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to test drive some Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD’s as a follow-up to some earlier activity trying their Enterprise TurboBoost Drives. Disclosure: Seagate has been a StorageIO client and was also the sponsor of this white paper and associated proof-points mentioned in this post.

The question to ask yourself is not if flash Solid State Device (SSD) technologies are in your future, Instead the questions are when, where, using what, how to configure and related themes. SSD including traditional DRAM and NAND flash-based technologies are like real estate where location matters; however, there are different types of properties to meet various needs. This means leveraging different types of NAND flash SSD technologies in different locations in a complementary and cooperative aka hybrid way. For example nand flash SSD as part of an enterprise tiered storage strategy can be implemented server-side using PCIe cards, SAS and SATA drives as targets or as cache along with software, as well as leveraging SSD devices in storage systems or appliances.

Seagate 1200 SSD
Seagate 1200 Enterprise SAS 12Gbs SSD Image via Seagate.com

Another place where nand flash can be found and compliments SSD devices are so-called Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) or Hybrid Hard Disk Drives (HHDD) including a new generation that accelerate writes as well as reads such as those Seagate refers to as with Enterprise TurboBoost. The Enterprise TurboBoost drives (view the companion StorageIO Lab review TurboBoost white paper here) were previously known as the Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) or Hybrid Hard Disk Drives (HHDD). Read more about TurboBoost here and here.

The best server and storage I/O is the one you do not have to do

Keep in mind that the best server or storage I/O is that one that you do not have to do, with the second best being the one with the least overhead resolved as close to the processor (compute) as possible or practical. The following figure shows that the best place to resolve server and storage I/O is as close to the compute processor as possible however only a finite amount of storage memory located there. This is where the server memory and storage I/O hierarchy comes into play which is also often thought of in the context of tiered storage balancing performance and availability with cost and architectural limits.

Also shown is locality of reference which refers to how close data is to where it is being used and includes cache effectiveness or buffering. Hence a small amount of cache of flash and DRAM in the right location can have a large benefit. Now if you can afford it, install as much DRAM along with flash storage as possible, however if you are like most organizations with finite budgets yet server and storage I/O challenges, then deploy a tiered flash storage strategy.

flash cache locality of reference
Server memory storage I/O hierarchy, locality of reference

Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD’s

Back to the Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD which is covered in this StorageIO Industry Trends Perspective thought leadership white paper. The focus of the white paper is to look at how the Seagate 1200 Enterprise class SSD’s and 12Gbps SAS address current and next generation tiered storage for virtual, cloud, traditional Little and Big Data infrastructure environments.

Seagate 1200 Enteprise SSD

This includes providing proof points running various workloads including Database TPC-B, TPC-E and Microsoft Exchange in the StorageIO Labs along with cache software comparing SSD, SSHD and different HDD’s including 12Gbs SAS 6TB near-line high-capacity drives.

Seagate 1200 Enterprise SSD Proof Points

The proof points in this white paper are from an applications focus perspective representing more of an end-to-end real-world situation. While they are not included in this white paper, StorageIO has run traditional storage building-block focus workloads, which can be found at StorageIOblog (Part II: How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do with VMware?). These include tools such as Iometer, iorate, vdbench among others for various IO sizes, mixed, random, sequential, reads, writes along with “hot-band" across different number of threads (concurrent users). “Hot-Band” is part of the SNIA Emerald energy effectiveness metrics for looking at sustained storage performance using tools such as vdbench. Read more about other various server and storage I/O benchmarking tools and techniques here.

For the following series of proof-points (TPC-B, TPC-E and Exchange) a system under test (SUT) consisted of a physical server (described with the proof-points) configured with VMware ESXi along with guests virtual machines (VMs) configured to do the storage I/O workload. Other servers were used in the case of TPC workloads as application transactional requester to drive the SQL Server database and resulting server storage I/O workload. VMware was used in the proof-points to reflect a common industry trend of using virtual server infrastructures (VSI) supporting applications including database, email among others. For the proof-point scenarios, the SUT along with storage system device under test were dedicated to that scenario (e.g. no other workload running) unless otherwise noted.

Server Storage I/O config
Server Storage I/O configuration for proof-points

Microsoft Exchange Email proof-point configuration

For this proof-point, Microsoft Jet Stress Exchange performance workloads were placed (e.g. Exchange Database – EDB file) on each of the different devices under test with various metrics shown including activity rates and response time for reads as well as writes. For the Exchange testing, the EDB was placed on the device being tested while its log files were placed on a separate Seagate 400GB Enterprise 12Gbps SAS SSD.

Test configuration: Seagate 400GB 12000 2.5” SSD (ST400FM0073) 12Gbps SAS, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise 15K with TurboBoost™ (ST600MX) 6 Gbps SAS, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise Enhanced 15K V4 (15K RPM) HDD (ST600MP) with 6 Gbps SAS, Seagate Enterprise Capacity Nearline (ST6000NM0014) 6TB 3.5” 7.2K RPM HDD 12 Gbps SAS and 3TB 7.2K SATA HDD. Email server hosted as guest on VMware vSphere/ESXi V5.5, Microsoft SBS2011 Service Pack 1 64 bit. Guest VM (VMware vSphere 5.5) was on a SSD based dat, had a physical machine (host), with 14 GB DRAM, quad CPU (4 x 3.192GHz) Intel E3-1225 v300, with LSI 9300 series 12Gbps SAS adapters in a PCIe Gen 3 slot with Jet Stress 2010.  All devices being tested were Raw Device Mapped (RDM) where EDB resided. VM on a SSD based separate data store than devices being tested. Log file IOPs were handled via a separate SSD device also persistent (no delayed writes). EDB was 300GB and workload ran for 8 hours.

Microsoft Exchange VMware SSD performance
Microsoft Exchange proof-points comparing various storage devices

TPC-B (Database, Data Warehouse, Batch updates) proof-point configuration

SSD’s are a good fit for both transaction database activity with reads and write as well as query-based decision support systems (DSS), data warehouse and big data analytics. The following are proof points of SSD capabilities for database activity. In addition to supporting database table files and objects, along with transaction journal logs, other uses include for meta-data, import/export or other high-IO and write intensive scenarios. Two database workload profiles were tested including batch update (write-intensive) and transactional. Activity involved running Transaction Performance Council (TPC) workloads TPC-B (batch update) and TPC-E (transaction/OLTP simulate financial trading system) against Microsoft SQL Server 2012 databases. Each test simulation had the SQL Server database (MDF) on a different device with transaction log file (LDF) on a separate SSD. TPC-B for a single device results shown below.

TPC-B (write intensive) results below show how TPS work being done (blue) increases from left to right (more is better) for various numbers of simulated users. Also shown on the same line for each amount of TPS work being done is the average latency in seconds (right to left) where lower is better. Results are shown from top to bottom for each group of users (100, 50, 20 and 1) for the different drives being tested (top to bottom). Note how the SSD device does more work at a lower response time vs. traditional HDD’s

Test configuration: Seagate 400GB 12000 2.5” SSD (ST400FM0073) 12Gbps SAS, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise 15K with TurboBoost™ (ST600MX) 6 Gbps SAS, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise Enhanced 15K V4 (15K RPM) HDD (ST600MP) with 6 Gbps SAS, Seagate Enterprise Capacity Nearline (ST6000NM0014) 6TB 3.5” 7.2K RPM HDD 12 Gbps SAS and 3TB Seagate 7.2K SATA HDD Workload generator and virtual clients Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 database was on Windows 7 guest. Guest VM (VMware vSphere 5.5) had a dedicated 14 GB DRAM, quad CPU (4 x 3.192GHz) Intel E3-1225 v300, with LSI 9300 series 12Gbps SAS adapters in a PCIe Gen 3 slot along with TPC-B (www.tpc.org) workloads.

VM with guest OS along with SQL tempdb and masterdb resided on separate SSD based data store from devices being tested (e.g., where MDF (main database tables) and LDF (log file) resided). All devices being tested were Raw Device Mapped (RDM) independent persistent with database log file on a separate SSD device also persistent (no delayed writes) using VMware PVSCSI driver. MDF and LDF file sizes were 142GB and 26GB with scale factor of 10000, with each step running for one hour (10-minute preamble). Note that these proof-points DO NOT use VMware or any other third-party cache software or I/O acceleration tool technologies as those are covered later in a separate proof-point.

TPC-B sql server database SSD performance
TPC-B SQL Server database proof-points comparing various storage devices

TPC-E (Database, Financial Trading) proof-point configuration

The following shows results from TPC-E test (OLTP/transactional workload) simulating a financial trading system. TPC-E is an industry standard workload that performs a mix of reads and writes database queries. Proof-points were performed with various numbers of users from 10, 20, 50 and 100 to determine (TPS) Transaction per Second (aka I/O rate) and response time in seconds. The TPC-E transactional results are shown for each device being tested across different user workloads. The results show how TPC-E TPS work (blue) increases from left to right (more is better) for larger numbers of users along with corresponding latency (green) that goes from right to left (less is better). The Seagate Enterprise 1200 SSD is shown on the top in the figure below with a red box around its results. Note how the SSD as a lower latency while doing more work compared to the other traditional HDD’s

Test configuration: Seagate 400GB 12000 2.5” SSD (ST400FM0073) 12Gbps SAS, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise 15K with TurboBoost™ (ST600MX) 6 Gbps SAS, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise Enhanced 15K V4 (15K RPM) HDD (ST600MP) with 6 Gbps SAS, Seagate Enterprise Capacity Nearline (ST6000NM0014) 6TB 3.5” 7.2K RPM HDD 12 Gbps SAS and 3TB Seagate 7.2K SATA HDD Workload generator and virtual clients Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 database was on Windows 7 guest. Guest VM (VMware vSphere 5.5) had a dedicated 14 GB DRAM, quad CPU (4 x 3.192GHz) Intel E3-1225 v300, with LSI 9300 series 12Gbps SAS adapters in a PCIe Gen 3 slot along with TPC-B (www.tpc.org) workloads.

VM with guest OS along with SQL tempdb and masterdb resided on separate SSD based data store from devices being tested (e.g., where MDF (main database tables) and LDF (log file) resided). All devices being tested were Raw Device Mapped (RDM) independent persistent with database log file on a separate SSD device also persistent (no delayed writes) using VMware PVSCSI driver. MDF and LDF file sizes were 142GB and 26GB with scale factor of 10000, with each step running for one hour (10-minute preamble). Note that these proof-points DO NOT use VMware or any other third-party cache software or I/O acceleration tool technologies as those are covered later in a separate proof-point.

TPC-E sql server database SSD performance
TPC-E (Financial trading) SQL Server database proof-points comparing various storage devices

Continue reading part-two of this two-part series here including the virtual server storage I/O blender effect and solution.

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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Part II: Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD StorgeIO lab review

Part II: Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD StorgeIO lab review

This is the second post of a two part series, read the first post here.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to test drive some Seagate 1200 12Gbs Enterprise SAS SSD’s as a follow-up to some earlier activity trying their Enterprise TurboBoost Drives. Disclosure: Seagate has been a StorageIO client and was also the sponsor of this white paper and associated proof-points mentioned in this post.

The Server Storage I/O Blender Effect Bottleneck

The earlier proof-points focused on SSD as a target or storage device. In the following proof-points, the Seagate Enterprise 1200 SSD is used as a shared read cache (write-through). Using a write-through cache enables a given amount of SSD to give a performance benefit to other local and networked storage devices.

traditional server storage I/O
Non-virtualized servers with dedicated storage and I/O paths.

Aggregation causes aggravation with I/O bottlenecks because of consolidation using server virtualization. The following figure shows non-virtualized servers with their own dedicated physical machine (PM) and I/O resources. When various servers are virtualized and hosted by a common host (physical machine), their various workloads compete for I/O and other resources. In addition to competing for I/O performance resources, these different servers also tend to have diverse workloads.

virtual server storage I/O blender
Virtual server storage I/O blender bottleneck (aggregation causes aggravation)

The figure above shows aggregation causing aggravation with the result being I/O bottlenecks as various applications performance needs converge and compete with each other. The aggregation and consolidation result is a blend of random, sequential, large, small, read and write characteristics. These different storage I/O characteristics are mixed up and need to be handled by the underlying I/O capabilities of the physical machine and hypervisor. As a result, a common deployment for SSD in addition to as a target device for storing data is as a cache to cut bottlenecks for traditional spinning HDD.

In the following figure a solution is shown introducing I/O caching with SSD to help mitigate or cut the effects of server consolation causing performance aggravations.

Creating a server storage I/O blender bottleneck

xxxxx
Addressing the VMware Server Storage I/O blender with cache

Addressing server storage I/O blender and other bottlenecks

For these proof-points, the goal was to create an I/O bottleneck resulting from multiple VMs in a virtual server environment performing application work. In this proof-point, multiple competing VMs including a SQL Server 2012 database and an Exchange server shared the same underlying storage I/O infrastructure including HDD’s The 6TB (Enterprise Capacity) HDD was configured as a VMware dat and allocated as virtual disks to the VMs. Workloads were then run concurrently to create an I/O bottleneck for both cached and non-cached results.

xxxxx
Server storage I/O with virtualization roof-point configuration topology

The following figure shows two sets of proof points, cached (top) and non-cached (bottom) with three workloads. The workloads consisted of concurrent Exchange and SQL Server 2012 (TPC-B and TPC-E) running on separate virtual machine (VM) all on the same physical machine host (SUT) with database transactions being driven by two separate servers. In these proof-points, the applications data were placed onto the 6TB SAS HDD to create a bottleneck, and a portion of the SSD used as a cache. Note that the Virtunet cache software allows you to use a part of a SSD device for cache with the balance used as a regular storage target should you want to do so.

If you have paid attention to the earlier proof-points, you might notice that some of the results below are not as good as those seen in the Exchange, TPC-B and TPC-E results about. The reason is simply that the earlier proof-points were run without competing workloads, and database along with log or journal files were placed on separate drives for performance. In the following proof-point as part of creating a server storage I/O blender bottleneck the Exchange, TPC-B as well as TPC-E workloads were all running concurrently with all data on the 6TB drive (something you normally would not want to do).

storage I/O blender solved
Solving the VMware Server Storage I/O blender with cache

The cache and non-cached mixed workloads shown above prove how an SSD based read-cache can help to reduce I/O bottlenecks. This is an example of addressing the aggravation caused by aggregation of different competing workloads that are consolidated with server virtualization.

For the workloads shown above, all data (database tables and logs) were placed on VMware virtual disks created from a dat using a single 7.2K 6TB 12Gbps SAS HDD (e.g. Seagate Enterprise Capacity).

The guest VM system disks which included paging, applications and other data files were virtual disks using a separate dat mapped to a single 7.2K 1TB HDD. Each workload ran for eight hours with the TPC-B and TPC-E having 50 simulated users. For the TPC-B and TPC-E workloads, two separate servers were used to drive the transaction requests to the SQL Server 2012 database.

For the cached tests, a Seagate Enterprise 1200 400GB 12Gbps SAS SSD was used as the backing store for the cache software (Virtunet Systems Virtucache) that was installed and configured on the VMware host.

During the cached tests, the physical HDD for the data files (e.g. 6TB HDD) and system volumes (1TB HDD) were read cache enabled. All caching was disabled for the non-cached workloads.

Note that this was only a read cache, which has the side benefit of off-loading those activities enabling the HDD to focus on writes, or read-ahead. Also note that the combined TPC-E, TPC-B and Exchange databases, logs and associated files represented over 600GB of data, there was also the combined space and thus cache impact of the two system volumes and their data. This simple workload and configuration is representative of how SSD caching can complement high-capacity HDD’s

Seagate 6TB 12Gbs SAS high-capacity HDD

While the star and focus of these series of proof-points is the Seagate 1200 Enterprise 12Gbs SAS SSD, the caching software (virtunet) and Enterprise TurboBoost drives also play key supporting and favorable roles. However the 6TB 12Gbs SAS high-capacity drive caught my attention from a couple of different perspectives. Certainly the space capacity was interesting along with a 12Gbs SAS interface well suited for near-line, high-capacity and dense tiered storage environments. However for a high-capacity drive its performance is what really caught my attention both in the standard exchange, TPC-B and TPC-E workloads, as well as when combined with SSD and cache software.

This opens the door for a great combination of leveraging some amount of high-performance flash-based SSD (or TurboBoost drives) combined with cache software and high-capacity drives such as the 6TB device (Seagate now has larger versions available). Something else to mention is that the 6TB HDD in addition to being available in either 12Gbs SAS, 6Gbs SAS or 6Gbs SATA also has enhanced durability with a Read Bit Error Rate of 10 ^15 (e.g. 1 second read error per 10^15 average attempts) and an AFR (annual failure rate) of 0.63% (See more speeds and feeds here). Hence if you are concerned about using large capacity HDD’s and them failing, make sure you go with those that have a high Read Bit Error Rate and a low AFR which are more common with enterprise class vs. lower cost commodity or workstation drives. Note that these high-capacity enterprise HDD’s are also available with Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) options.

Summary

Read more in this StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective (ITP) white paper compliments of Seagate 1200 12Gbs SAS SSD’s and visit the Seagate Enterprise 1200 12Gbs SAS SSD page here. Moving forward there is the notion that flash SSD will be everywhere. There is a difference between all data on flash SSD vs. having some amount of SSD involved in preserving, serving and protecting (storing) information.

Key themes to keep in mind include:

  • Aggregation can cause aggravation which SSD can alleviate
  • A relative small amount of flash SSD in the right place can go a long way
  • Fast flash storage needs fast server storage I/O access hardware and software
  • Locality of reference with data close to applications is a performance enabler
  • Flash SSD everywhere does not mean everything has to be SSD based
  • Having some amount of flash in different places is important for flash everywhere
  • Different applications have various performance characteristics
  • SSD as a storage device or persistent cache can speed up IOPs and bandwidth

Flash and SSD are in your future, this comes back to the questions of how much flash SSD do you need, along with where to put it, how to use it and when.

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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Seagate has shipped over 10 Million storage HHDD’s, is that a lot?

Seagate has shipped over 10 Million storage HHDD’s, is that a lot?

Recently Seagate made an announcement that they have shipped over 10 million Hybrid Hard Disk Drives (HHDD) also known as Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) over that past few years. Disclosure Seagate has been a StorageIO client.

I know where some of those desktop class HHDD’s including Momentus XTs ended up as I bought some of the 500GB and 750GB models via Amazon and have them in various systems. Likewise I have installed in VMware servers the newer generation of enterprise class SSHD’s which Seagate now refers to as Turbo models as companions to my older HHDD’s

What is a HHDD or SSHD?

The HHDD’s continue to evolve from initially accelerating reads to now being capable of speeding up write operations across different families (desktop/mobile, workstation and enterprise). What makes a HHDD or SSHD is that as their name implies, they are a hybrid combing a traditional spinning magnetic Hard Disk Drive (HDD) along with flash SSD storage. The flash persistent memory is in addition to the DRAM or non-persistent memory typically found on HDDs used as a cache buffer. These HHDDs or SSHDs are self-contained in that the flash are built-in to the actual drive as part of its internal electronics circuit board (controller). This means that the drives should be transparent to the operating systems or hypervisors on servers or storage controllers without need for special adapters, controller cards or drivers. In addition, there is no extra software needed to automated tiering or movement between the flash on the HHDD or SSHD and its internal HDD, its all self-contained managed by the drives firmware (e.g. software).

Some SSHD and HHDD industry perspectives

Jim Handy over at Objective Analysis has this interesting post discussing Hybrid Drives Not Catching On. The following is an excerpt from Jim’s post.

Why were our expectations higher? 

There were a few reasons: The hybrid drive can be viewed as an evolution of the DRAM cache already incorporated into nearly all HDDs today. 

  • Replacing or augmenting an expensive DRAM cache with a slower, cheaper NAND cache makes a lot of sense.
  • An SSHD performs much better than a standard HDD at a lower price than an SSD. In fact, an SSD of the same capacity as today’s average HDD would cost about an order of magnitude more than the HDD. The beauty of an SSHD is that it provides near-SSD performance at a near-HDD price. This could have been a very compelling sales proposition had it been promoted in a way that was understood and embraced by end users.
  • Some expected for Seagate to include this technology into all HDDs and not to try to continue using it as a differentiator between different Seagate product lines. The company could have taken either of two approaches: To use hybrid technology to break apart two product lines – standard HDDs and higher-margin hybrid HDDs, or to merge hybrid technology into all Seagate HDDs to differentiate Seagate HDDs from competitors’ products, allowing Seagate to take slightly higher margins on all HDDs. Seagate chose the first path.

The net result is shipments of 10 million units since its 2010 introduction, for an average of 2.5 million per year, out of a total annual HDD shipments of around 500 million units, or one half of one percent.

Continue reading more of Jim’s post here.

In his post, Jim raises some good points including that HHDD’s and SSHD’s are still a fraction of the overall HDD’s shipped on an annual basis. However IMHO the annual growth rate has not been a flat average of 2.5 million, rather starting at a lower rate and then increasing year over year. For example Seagate issued a press release back in summer 2011 that they had shipped a million HHDD’s a year after their release. Also keep in mind that those HHDD’s were focused on desktop workstations and in particular, at Gamers among others.

The early HHDD’s such as the Momentus XTs that I was using starting in June 2010 only had read acceleration which was better than HDD’s, however did not help out on writes. Over the past couple of years there have been enhancements to the HHDD’s including the newer generation also known as SSHD’s or Turbo drives as Seagate now calls them. These newer drives include write acceleration as well as with models for mobile/laptop, workstation and enterprise class including higher-performance and high-capacity versions. Thus my estimates or analysis has the growth on an accelerating curve vs. linear growth rate (e.g. average of 2.5 million units per year).

 Units shipped per yearRunning total units shipped
2010-20111.0 Million1.0 Million
2011-20121.25 Million (est.)2.25 Million (est.)
2012-20132.75 Million (est.)5.0 Million (est.)
2013-20145.0 Million (est)10.0 Million

StorageIO estimates on HHDD/SSHD units shipped based on Seagate announcements

estimated hhdd and sshd shipments

However IMHO there is more to the story beyond numbers of HHDD/SSHD shipped or if they are accelerating in deployment or growing at an average rate. Some of those perspectives are in my comments over on Jim Handy’s site with an excerpt below.

In talking with IT professionals (e.g. what the vendors/industry calls users/customers) they are generally not aware that these devices exist, or if they are aware of them, they are only aware of what was available in the past (e.g. the consumer class read optimized versions). I do talk with some who are aware of the newer generation devices however their comments are usually tied to lack of system integrator (SI) or vendor/OEM support, or sole source. Also there was a focus on promoting the HHDD’s to “gamers” or other power users as opposed to broader marketing efforts. Also most of these IT people are not aware of the newer generation of SSHD or what Seagate is now calling “Turbo” drives.

When talking with VAR’s, there is a similar reaction which is discussion about lack of support for HHDD’s or SSHD’s from the SI/vendor OEMs, or single source supply concerns. Also a common reaction is lack of awareness around current generation of SSHD’s (e.g. those that do write optimization, as well as enterprise class versions).

When talking with vendors/OEMs, there is a general lack of awareness of the newer enterprise class SSHD’s/HHDD’s that do write acceleration, sometimes there is concern of how this would disrupt their “hybrid” SSD + HDD or tiering marketing stories/strategies, as well as comments about single source suppliers. Have also heard comments to the effect of concerns about how long or committed are the drive manufactures going to be focused on SSHD/HHDD, or is this just a gap filler for now.

Not surprisingly when I talk with industry pundits, influencers, amplifiers (e.g. analyst, media, consultants, blogalysts) there is a reflection of all the above which is lack of awareness of what is available (not to mention lack of experience) vs. repeating what has been heard or read about in the past.

IMHO while there are some technology hurdles, the biggest issue and challenge is that of some basic marketing and business development to generate awareness with the industry (e.g. pundits), vendors/OEMs, VAR’s, and IT customers, that is of course assuming SSHD/HHDD are here to stay and not just a passing fad…

What about SSHD and HHDD performance on reads and writes?

What about the performance of today’s HHDD’s and SSHD’s, particular those that can accelerate writes as well as reads?

SSHD and HHDD read / write performance exchange
Enterprise Turbo SSHD read and write performance (Exchange Email)

What about the performance of today’s HHDD’s and SSHD’s, particular those that can accelerate writes as well as reads?

SSHD and HHDD performance TPC-B
Enterprise Turbo SSHD read and write performance (TPC-B database)

SSHD and HHDD performance TPC-E
Enterprise Turbo SSHD read and write performance (TPC-E database)

Additional details and information about HHDD/SSHD or as Seagate now refers to them Turbo drives can be found in two StorageIO Industry Trends Perspective White Papers (located here and another here).

Where to learn more

Refer to the following links to learn more about HHDD and SSHD devices.
StorageIO Momentus Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD) Moments
Enterprise SSHD and Flash SSD
Part of an Enterprise Tiered Storage Strategy
Part II: How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do with VMware?
2011 Summer momentus hybrid hard disk drive (HHDD) moment
More Storage IO momentus HHDD and SSD moments part I
More Storage IO momentus HHDD and SSD moments part II
New Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive (SSD and HDD)
Another StorageIO Hybrid Momentus Moment
SSD past, present and future with Jim Handy
Part II: How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do with VMware?

Closing comments and perspectives

I continue to be bullish on hybrid storage solutions from cloud, to storage systems as well as hybrid-storage devices. However like many technology just because something makes sense or is interesting does not mean its a near-term or long-term winner. My main concern with SSHD and HHDD is if the manufactures such as Seagate and WD are serious about making them a standard feature in all drives, or simply as a near-term stop-gap solution.

What’s your take or experience with using HHDD and/or SSHDs?

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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Enterprise SSHD and Flash SSD Part of an Enterprise Tiered Storage Strategy

Enterprise SSHD and Flash SSD Part of an Enterprise Tiered Storage Strategy

The question to ask yourself is not if flash Solid State Device (SSD) technologies are in your future.

Instead the questions are when, where, using what, how to configure and related themes. SSD including traditional DRAM and NAND flash-based technologies are like real estate where location matters; however, there are different types of properties to meet various needs. This means leveraging different types of NAND flash SSD technologies in different locations in a complementary and cooperative aka hybrid way.

Introducing Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD)

Solid State Hybrid Disks (SSHD) are the successors to previous generation Hybrid Hard Disk Drives (HHDD) that I have used for several years (you can read more about them here, and here).

While it would be nice to simply have SSD for everything, there are also economic budget realities to be dealt with. Keep in mind that a bit of nand flash SSD cache in the right location for a given purpose can go a long way which is the case with SSHDs. This is also why in many environments today there is a mix of SSD, HDD of various makes, types, speeds and capacities (e.g. different tiers) to support diverse application needs (e.g. not everything in the data center is the same).

However, If you have the need for speed and can afford or benefit from the increased productivity by all means go SSD!

Otoh if you have budget constraints and need more space capacity yet want some performance boost, then SSHDs are an option. The big difference however between today’s SSHDs that are available for both enterprise class storage systems and servers, as well as desktop environments is that they can accelerate both reads and writes. This is different from their predecessors that I have used for several years now that had basic read acceleration, however no write optimizations.

SSHD storage I/O oppourtunity
Better Together: Where SSHDs fit in an enterprise tiered storage environment with SSD and HDDs

As their names imply, they are a hybrid between a nand flash Solid State Device (SSD) and traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD) meaning a best of situation. This means that the SSHD are based on a traditional spinning HDD (various models with different speeds, space capacity, interfaces) along with DRAM (which is found on most modern HDDs), along with nand flash for read cache, and some extra nonvolatile memory for persistent write cache combined with a bit of software defined storage performance optimization algorithms.

Btw, if you were paying attention to that last sentence you would have picked up on something about nonvolatile memory being used for persistent write cache which should prompt the question would that help with nand flash write endurance? Yup.

Where and when to use SSHD?

In the StorageIO Industry Trends Perspective thought leadership white paper I recently released compliments of Seagate Enterprise Turbo SSHD (that’s a disclosure btw ;) enterprise class Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) were looked at and test driven in the StorageIO Labs with various application workloads. These activities include being in a virtual environment for common applications including database and email messaging using industry standard benchmark workloads (e.g. TPC-B and TPC-E for database, JetStress for Exchange).

Storage I/O sshd white paper

Conventional storage system focused workloads using iometer, iorate and vdbench were also run in the StorageIO Labs to set up baseline reads, writes, random, sequential, small and large I/O size with IOPs, bandwidth and response time latency results. Some of those results can be found here (Part II: How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do with VMware?) with other ongoing workloads continuing in different configurations. The various test drive proof points were done in the   comparing SSHD, SSD and different HDDs.

Data Protection (Archiving, Backup, BC, DR)

Staging cache buffer area for snapshots, replication or current copies before streaming to other storage tier using fast read/write capabilities. Meta data, index and catalogs benefit from fast reads and writes for faster protection.

Big Data DSS
Data Warehouse

Support sequential read-ahead operations and “hot-band” data caching in a cost-effective way using SSHD vs. slower similar capacity size HDDs for Data warehouse, DSS and other analytic environments.

Email, Text and Voice Messaging

Microsoft Exchange and other email journals, mailbox or object repositories can leverage faster read and write I/Os with more space capacity.

OLTP, Database
 Key Value Stores SQL and NoSQL

Eliminate the need to short stroke HDDs to gain performance, offer more space capacity and IOP performance per device for tables, logs, journals, import/export and scratch, temporary ephemeral storage. Leverage random and sequential read acceleration to compliment server-side SSD-based read and write-thru caching. Utilize fast magnetic media for persistent data reducing wear and tear on more costly flash SSD storage devices.

Server Virtualization

Fast disk storage for data stores and virtual disks supporting VMware vSphere/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, Xen and others.  Holding virtual machines such as VMware VMDKs, along with Hyper-V and other hypervisor virtual disks.  Compliment virtual server read cache and I/O optimization using SSD as a cache with writes going to fast SSHD. For example VMware V5.5 Virtual SAN host disk groups use SSD as a read cache and can use SSHD as the magnetic disk for storing data while boosting performance without breaking the budget or adding complexity.

Speaking of Virtual, as mentioned the various proof points were run using Windows systems that were VMware guests with the SSHD and other devices being Raw Device Mapped (RDM) SAS and SATA attached, read how to do that here.

Hint: If you know about the VMware trick for making a HDD look like a SSD to vSphere/ESXi (refer to here and here) think outside the virtual box for a moment on some things you could do with SSHD in a VSAN environment among other things, for now, just sayin ;).

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

SSHD can be used as high performance magnetic disk for storing linked clone images, applications and data. Leverage fast read to support read ahead or pre-fetch to compliment SSD based read cache solutions. Utilize fast writes to quickly store data enabling SSD-based read or write-thru cache solutions to be more effective. Reduce impact of boot, shutdown, and virus scan or maintenance storms while providing more space capacity.

Table 1 Example application and workload scenarios benefiting from SSHDs

Test drive application proof points

Various workloads were run using Seagate Enterprise Turbo SSHD in the StorageIO lab environment across different real world like application workload scenarios. These include general storage I/O performance characteristics profiling (e.g. reads, writes, random, sequential or various IOP size) to understand how these devices compare to other HDD, HHDD and SSD storage devices in terms of IOPS, bandwidth and response time (latency). In addition to basic storage I/O profiling, the Enterprise Turbo SSHD was also used with various SQL database workloads including Transaction Processing Council (TPC); along with VMware server virtualization among others use case scenarios.

Note that in the following workload proof points a single drive was used meaning that using more drives in a server or storage system should yield better performance. This also means scaling would be bound by the constraints of a given configuration, server or storage system. These were also conducted using 6Gbps SAS with PCIe Gen 2 based servers and ongoing testing is confirming even better results with 12Gbs SAS, faster servers with PCIe Gen 3.

SSHD large file storage i/o
Copy (read and write) 80GB and 220GB file copies (time to copy entire file)

SSHD storage I/O TPCB Database performance
SQLserver TPC-B batch database updates

Test configuration: 600GB 2.5” Enterprise Turbo SSHD (ST600MX) 6 Gbps SAS, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise Enhanced 15K V4 (15K RPM) HDD (ST600MP) with 6 Gbps SAS, 500GB 3.5” 7.2K RPM HDD 3 Gbps SATA, 1TB 3.5” 7.2K RPM HDD 3 Gbps SATA. Workload generator and virtual clients ran on Windows 7 Ultimate. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Database was on Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (64 bit) 14 GB DRAM, Dual CPU (Intel x3490 2.93 GHz)), with LSI 9211 6Gbps SAS adapters with TPC-B (www.tpc.org) workloads. VM resided on separate data store from devices being tested. All devices being tested with SQL MDF were Raw Device Mapped (RDM) independent persistent with database log file (LDF) on a separate SSD device also persistent (no delayed writes). Tests were performed in StorageIO Lab facilities by StorageIO personal.

SSHD storage I/O TPCE Database performance
SQLserver TPC-E transactional workload

Test configuration: 600GB 2.5” Enterprise Turbo SSHD (ST600MX) 6 Gbps SAS, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise Enhanced 15K V4 (15K RPM) HDD (ST600MP) with 6 Gbps SAS, 300GB 2.5” Savio 10K RPM HDD 6 Gbps SAS, 1TB 3.5” 7.2K RPM HDD 6 Gbps SATA. Workload generator and virtual clients Windows 7 Ultimate. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 database was on Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (64 bit) 14 GB DRAM, Dual CPU (E8400 2.99GHz), with LSI 9211 6Gbps SAS adapters with TPC-E (www.tpc.org) workloads. VM resided on separate SSD based data store from devices being tested (e.g., where MDF resided). All devices being tested were Raw Device Mapped (RDM) independent persistent with database log file on a separate SSD device also persistent (no delayed writes). Tests were performed in StorageIO Lab facilities by StorageIO personal.

SSHD storage I/O Exchange performance
Microsoft Exchange workload

Test configuration: 2.5” Seagate 600 Pro 120GB (ST120FP0021 ) SSD 6 Gbps SATA, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise Turbo SSHD (ST600MX) 6 Gbps SAS, 600GB 2.5” Enterprise Enhanced 15K V4 (15K RPM) HDD (ST600MP) with 6 Gbps SAS, 2.5” Savio 146GB HDD 6 Gbps SAS, 3.5” Barracuda 500GB 7.2K RPM HDD 3 Gbps SATA. Email server hosted as guest on VMware vSphere/ESXi V5.5, Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Service Pack 1 64 bit, 8GB DRAM, One CPU (Intel X3490 2.93 GHz) LSI 9211 6 Gbps SAS adapter, JetStress 2010 (no other active workload during test intervals). All devices being tested were Raw Device Mapped (RDM) where EDB resided. VM on a SSD based separate data store than devices being tested. Log file IOPs were handled via a separate SSD device.

Read more about the above proof points along view data points and configuration information in the associated white paper found here (no registration required).

What this all means

Similar to flash-based SSD technologies the question is not if, rather when, where, why and how to deploy hybrid solutions such as SSHDs. If your applications and data infrastructures environment have the need for storage I/O speed without loss of space capacity and breaking your budget, SSD enabled devices like the Seagate Enterprise Turbo 600GB SSHD are in your future. You can learn more about enterprise class SSHD such as those from Seagate by visiting this link here.

Watch for extra workload proof points being performed including with 12Gbps SAS and faster servers using PCIe Gen 3.

Ok, nuff said.

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