Which HDD for Content Applications general I/O Performance
Updated 1/23/2018
Which enterprise HDD to use with a content server platform general I/O performance Insight for effective server storage I/O decision making
Server StorageIO Lab Review
This is the sixth in a multi-part series (read part five here) based on a white paper hands-on lab report I did compliments of Servers Direct and Seagate that you can read in PDF form here. The focus is looking at the Servers Direct (www.serversdirect.com) converged Content Solution platforms with Seagate Enterprise Hard Disk Drive (HDD’s). In this post the focus is around general I/O performance including 8KB and 128KB IOP sizes.
General I/O Performance
In addition to running database and file (large and small) processing workloads, Vdbench was also used to collect basic small (8KB) and large (128KB) sized I/O operations. This consisted of random and sequential reads as well as writes with the results shown below. In addition to using vdbench, other tools that could be used include Microsoft Diskspd, fio, iorate and iometer among many others.
These workloads used Vdbench configured (13) to do direct I/O to a Windows file system mounted device using as much of the available disk space as possible. All workloads used 16 threads and were run concurrently similar to database and file processing tests.
(Note 13) Sample vdbench configuration for general I/O, note different settings were used for various tests
Table-7 shows workload results for 8KB random IOPs 75% reads and 75% writes including IOPs, bandwidth and response time.
ENT 15K RAID1 | ENT 10K RAID1 | ENT CAP RAID1 | ENT 10K R10 | ECAP SW RAID (5 Drives) | |||||||||||
75% Read | 25% Read | 75% Read | 25% Read | 75% Read | 25% Read | 75% Read | 25% Read | 75% Read | 25% Read | ||||||
I/O Rate (IOPs) | 597.11 | 559.26 | 514 | 475 | 285 | 293 | 979 | 984 | 491 | 644 | |||||
MB/sec | 4.7 | 4.4 | 4.0 | 3.7 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 7.7 | 7.7 | 3.8 | 5.0 | |||||
Resp. Time (Sec.) | 25.9 | 27.6 | 30.2 | 32.7 | 55.5 | 53.7 | 16.3 | 16.3 | 32.6 | 24.8 | |||||
Table-7 8KB sized random IOPs workload results
Figure-6 shows small (8KB) random I/O (75% read and 25% read) across different HDD configurations. Performance including activity rates (e.g. IOPs), bandwidth and response time for mixed reads / writes are shown. Note how response time increases with the Enterprise Capacity configurations vs. other performance optimized drives.
Figure-6 8KB random reads and write showing IOP activity, bandwidth and response time
Table-8 below shows workload results for 8GB sized I/Os 100% sequential with 75% reads and 75% writes including IOPs, MB/sec and response time in seconds.
ENT 15K RAID1 | ENT 10K RAID1 | ENT CAP RAID1 | ENT 10K R10 | ECAP SW RAID (5 Drives) | ||||||
75% Read | 25% Read | 75% Read | 25% Read | 75% Read | 25% Read | 75% Read | 25% Read | 75% Read | 25% Read | |
I/O Rate (IOPs) | 3,778 | 3,414 | 3,761 | 3,986 | 3,379 | 1,274 | 11,840 | 8,368 | 2,891 | 1,146 |
MB/sec | 29.5 | 26.7 | 29.4 | 31.1 | 26.4 | 10.0 | 92.5 | 65.4 | 22.6 | 9.0 |
Resp. Time (Sec.) | 2.2 | 3.1 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.7 | 10.9 | 1.3 | 1.9 | 5.5 | 14.0 |
Table-8 8KB sized sequential workload results
Figure-7 shows small 8KB sequential mixed reads and writes (75% read and 75% write), while the Enterprise Capacity 2TB HDD has a large amount of space capacity, its performance in a RAID 1 vs. other similar configured drives is slower.
Figure-7 8KB sequential 75% reads and 75% write showing bandwidth activity
Table-9 shows workload results for 100% sequential, 100% read and 100% write 128KB sized I/Os including IOPs, bandwidth and response time.
ENT 15K RAID1 | ENT 10K RAID1 | ENT CAP RAID1 | ENT 10K R10 | ECAP SW RAID (5 Drives) | ||||||
Read | Write | Read | Write | Read | Write | Read | Write | Read | Write | |
I/O Rate (IOPs) | 1,798 | 1,771 | 1,716 | 1,688 | 921 | 912 | 3,552 | 3,486 | 780 | 721 |
MB/sec | 224.7 | 221.3 | 214.5 | 210.9 | 115.2 | 114.0 | 444.0 | 435.8 | 97.4 | 90.1 |
Resp. Time (Sec.) | 8.9 | 9.0 | 9.3 | 9.5 | 17.4 | 17.5 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 19.3 | 20.2 |
Table-9 128KB sized sequential workload results
Figure-8 shows sequential or streaming operations of larger I/O (100% read and 100% write) requests sizes (128KB) that would be found with large content applications. Figure-8 highlights the relationship between lower response time and increased IOPs as well as bandwidth.
Figure-8 128KB sequential reads and write showing IOP activity, bandwidth and response time
Where To Learn More
- Part 1 of this series – Trends and Content Applications Servers
- Part 2 of this series – Content applications server decisions and testing plans
- Part 3 of this series – Test hardware and software configuration
- Part 4 of this series – Large file I/O processing
- Part 5 of this series – Small file I/O processing
- Part 6 of this series – General I/O processing
- Part 7 of this series – How HDD continue to evolve over different generations and wrap up
- As the platters spin, HDD’s for cloud, virtual and traditional storage environments
- How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do?
- Hard Disk Drives (HDD) for Virtual Environments
- Server and Storage I/O performance and benchmarking tools
- Additional Server StorageIO White Papers and Lab Reports, Solutions Briefs and Profiles, Tips and Articles
- PDF White Paper version of this post
- www.thenvmeplace.com and www.thessdplace.com
Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.
What This All Means
Some content applications are doing small random I/Os for database, key value stores or repositories as well as meta data processing while others are doing large sequential I/O. 128KB sized I/O may be large for your environment, on the other hand, with an increasing number of applications, file systems, software defined storage management tools among others, 1 to 10MB or even larger I/O sizes are becoming common. Key is selecting I/O sizes and read write as well as random sequential along with I/O or queue depths that align with your environment.
Continue reading part seven the final post in this multi-part series here where the focus is around how HDD’s continue to evolve including performance beyond traditional RPM based execrations along with wrap up.
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.
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