Around the Storage Block Blog : fibre channel

FCoE...it's almost time to get moving!

Sean Fitz — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:48:00 GMT

by Sean Fitzpatrick, StorageWorks Storage Platforms Business Development

Over the past few months, we've all witnessed positive milestones for FCoE...but...is it ready?

This past June the Fibre Channel Standards T11.3 BB-5 (back bone) working group finalized defining the spec (or ratified) and voted to forward it to INCITS for public review and eventually publication next year. Is the BB-5 spec good enough to develop product? Absolutely!

Also in June HP announced the availability of two ToR (top of rack) FCoE switches from Brocade and Cisco. Other companies have also announced future availability of FCoE products. This is positive move in the right direction for the industry and for customers looking to lower the TCO over time.

More resources and tools are available today from Brocade, Cisco, Emulex and QLogic to assist with evaluation and planning. HP's own SAN Design Guide provides great design ideas on how to build or modify existing SANs, including a dedicated application note on FCoE implementation guidelines.

As I've stated before, this stage is very important part of the early adopter Phase I to allow customers to evaluate the technology. The real adoption has yet to develop (phase II) and it will, once additional mature products become available. In the mean time IT managers should investigate adopting FCoE for small pilot projects and focusing on how it's going to improve their overall TCO.

From a timeline perspective 2009 is the year for proof of concept and planning. In 2010 I'm anticipating a wider breath of product availability from all the major suppliers.

HP's position is FCoE won't overtake traditional Fibre Channel next week, or even next year. But, now that FCoE is starting to move, it's getting exciting.

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More on SPC-2

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:47:00 GMT

Last month we announced a world record SPC-2 number by the XP24000. At the same time we extended yet another challenge to EMC to join the rest of the world in publishing benchmarks. They continue to decline the offer, arguing “representativeness”. I thought I’d clear up the “representativeness” question.

EMC’s argument that this XP is too costly starts from the assumption that SPC-2 only represents a video streaming workload. To quote, “128 146GB drive pairs in your 1152 drive box? A pure video streaming workload?” We actually see a widely diverse set of workloads used in the XP. The power of having both SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmark results is that they provide audited data that applies to almost any workload mix a customer might have. But if one had to pick a most common workload it would probably be database transaction processing by day, then back up and data mining workloads joining the transaction processing by night. SPC-2 models the back up and data mining aspects, with SPC-1 representing the transaction processing. SPC-2 is about a lot more than video streaming.

When people need bullet proof availability and high performance for transaction processing they turn to high end arrays like the XP24000. It’s probably the most common use for a high end array. Our data indicates that on average the number of disks in an initial XP purchase is right around the 265 in our SPC-2 configuration. Some of those won’t have the levels of controllers in the SPC-2 configuration. But an increasing number use thin provisioning. In those cases they will often get all the controllers they’ll need up front, delaying the disk purchases as you’d expect with thin provisioning. So the configuration and workloads look pretty representative.

Then consider a real use of the benchmark. A maximum number is key in assessing an array’s performance. Below that you can adjust disks, controllers, and cache to get fairly linear performance changes. But when you reach an array’s limit, all you can do is add another array. So once you know an array’s maximum number you know its whole range of performance. By maxing controllers we provide that top end number, giving the most useful result. For sequential workloads like back-up and data mining maxing disk count isn’t necessary, whereas it generally is for random workloads like transaction processing.

Now let’s discuss how one might use XP’s SPC-2 results. Let’s say you need a high end array for transaction processing. The most common case we see requires backup and data mining operations at night in a limited time window. Since the XP’s SPC-2 result is twice that of the next closest high end array, you can expect it to get the backup and data mining done with half the resources of the next fastest array. But with SPC-2 you can go further. You can look up the specific results for backup and data mining workloads which are around 10GB/s for the XP24000. Knowing how much data you need to backup and mine you can estimate how much of the system’s resources you’ll need to get those things done in your time window and therefore what’s still left for transaction processing during that window. You can scale that for the size array you need for transaction processing. And you can compare to other arrays that have posted results. All using audited data before you get sales reps involved.

SPC benchmarks are all about empowering the storage customer. XP24000’s SPC-2 result is important to the most common uses for high end arrays, as well as for less common uses like video editing. The configuration we used looks pretty typical, with choices made to make the result most useful to customers. The cost is pretty typical for this kind of need. At HP we expect to continue providing this kind of useful data for customers. And our challenge to EMC to publish a benchmark result still stands, though they’ll probably continue inventing reasons not to.

EMC, We Challenge You!

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:44:00 GMT

EMC, we're once again throwing down the gauntlet. Today the XP24000 put up the highest SPC-2 benchmark result in the world. The top spot for such demanding workloads as video streaming goes to the XP. Once again, your DMX is a no show. And once again we challenge you, this time to put up an SPC-2 number. Every other major storage vendor is now posting SPC results. Every other major storage vendor is now starting to give customers standard, open, audited performance results to show what they've got. You remain the only vendor keeping your product performance behind a smoke screen of mysterious numbers and internal testing. We challenge you join us in the world of openness and let customers quit guessing at how low the DMX's performance really is!

A New World Record for XP!

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:32:00 GMT

Yes, while the worlds top athletes were in Beijing striving for world records in their various sports HP's XP24000 was setting a new performance standard of its own. That standard is XP's new record SPC-2 benchmark result of 8.7GB/s! That surpasses the previous record by more than 20%, and trounces the next closest single array competitor by more than 2X. The swimmers in Beijing didn't set their new records by that kind of margin!

XP didn't buy this record either. At a price performance of $187/MB/s XP24000 produced its record at 2.5x better price performance than the previous record holder. That previous record was set by an IBM system of 16 separate storage arrays with 1536 disks and a virtualization appliance. A single XP24000 set the new record with just 265 disks. That's a single, bullet proof XP24000 taking on a whole team of IBM products, and winning! Record performance, superior price performance, and bullet proof availability. What more evidence could you want that storage consolidation with the XP24000 is a good thing?

I'd also like to point out that XP didn't have to be tuned like crazy to get this result. We did have to play around with the network and servers to get this result. 8.7GB/s is new territory for the SPC-2 benchmark. It took some effort to get it working at this level while keeping the network and servers out of the way. But with the array we pretty much just set it up and it worked. That means you can expect these kind of results on your real workloads without a lot of esoteric tuning. Pretty nice!

Now a few words about the biggest no show in the high end performance race, EMC. EMC is the only major storage vendor to never publish an SPC number, despite our open challenge for them to do so. They make plenty of performance leadership claims, but show no visible proof! Instead all they provide is vague arguments about SPC being unrepresentative. I think everybody realizes that if EMC could publish a leading number they'd do it in about a millisecond. Instead they won't even get in the pool with the XP! I think we can all figure out why.

Why is XP24000's new result important to a storage professional? The SPC-2 benchmark is the storage industry's standard benchmark for sequential workloads like video on demand, disk-to-disk backup, and large database queries. XP24000's results show the ability to serve >10,000 high quality video streams simultaneously. They also show the capacity to back up 36TB/hour which would keep 42 of the industry's fastest LTO-4 tape drives busy simultaneously. XP put up last year's top SPC-1 number for a single, HDD based array. Now XP has the SPC-2 record. Both results have been verified by an independent auditor and reviewed by our peers on the Storage Performance Council. I think this makes it pretty clear that XP is the gold medalist in storage performance!

Top Ten Reasons Why DAS Will Grow!

jasontreu — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:17:00 GMT

By Lee Johns

For a number of years now the relentless growth of SANs has overshadowed the Direct Attached Storage market (DAS). Indeed market studies have shown that while still a large market, DAS is shrinking. However, recent advances in SAS drives and SAS connectivity, along with market shifts are pointing to a resurgence of DAS.

I thought I might put forward 10 reasons why over the next 18 months DAS will grow! SO HERE WE GO (drum roll)...

1) SAS connectivity offers much more functionality that older SCSI cable connections. Indeed major systems manufacturers, like HP, have introduced SAS connected arrays that can provided a shared storage environment for multiple servers just like a SAN. For smaller environments this offers SAN functionality without the headache of managing a network.

2) Server Blades are the hotest growth area of the server market. By consolidating servers in a single enclosure, SAS based arrays will in the near future be able to share storage across more servers without using a network with traditional server architectures.

3) Server Virtualization is the hotest SW growth story in the market. Using products like VMware forces customers to have to consider how to implement shared storage, and for many using fibre channel storage is too expensive. SAS connectivity offers a lower cost alternative and is easier to manage, especially for server administrators. SAS products like the HP MSA 2000sa are VMware certified.

4) Although SAN's have consolidated a huge amount of data there still exists an extraordinary amount of drives in servers today that have not been consolidated for a variety of reasons. SAS offers a lower cost consolidation play for the drives that have not today been moved to SANs.

5) Ongoing management costs are one of the major issues faced by IT organizations today. If you don't already have a Fibre Channel SAN and just require shared storage for a few simple applications why look at managing a new fabric and hiring expensive SAN administrators?

6) Applications like Microsoft Exchange are moving more and more storage services inside the application. They are even recomending DAS for performance.

7) Web 2.0 companies are having to think differently about storage implementations b/c of new scale out applications. They can not afford traditional SAN's and the promise of architecting Storage based on DAS is compelling.

8) Server purchasers can not buy SANs without engaging Storage teams. They can buy shared SAS storage though and get the same effect.

9) Choice is always important as a consumer. Products like the HP MSA 2000 offers the choice of Fibre Channel, iSCSI or SAS interconnect, while providing the same basic functionality and management interface. This means you can buy into SAS connected storage with a simple migration path to a future SAN based on iSCSI or Fibre, if you need the future scalability.

10) AND FINALLY......... COST, COST, COST. It is an easy way for SMB's to implement shared storage and have you seen the economy lately?!?

What do you think?