Demand-Driven Storage Blog

Avere’s World Record NFS Performance in the Industry’s Smallest Footprint

Jeff Tabor — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:02:27 +0000

I’m blogging from the floor of the SC11 Exhibit Hall where we just broke out the free Red Bull performance drinks and unveiled a new booth backdrop to celebrate our new World Record. Stop by booth 442 if you are at the show.

Avere Systems shocked the storage world today and took the top NFS performance spot on the SPECsfs2008 benchmark, taking down the big dogs, NetApp and EMC/Isilon, in the process. Avere posted throughput of 1,564,404 ops/sec, which is the highest ever posted in the long history of the NFS benchmark. In addition, this throughput was achieved with an ORT (overall response time or latency) of just 0.99 msec, which is 35% better than NetApp’s best and 61% better than EMC’s best.

For more details on the performance tests by the three vendors, here are links to the posted SPECsfs2008 results from Avere, NetApp, and EMC/Isilon.

The performance that Avere demonstrated is impressive but it is only half the story. Even more impressive is the efficiency with which Avere delivered the results.

Avere delivered higher performance and lower latency with a system that costs dramatically less, both in terms of the capital expenses to purchase the system and operating expenses for space, power, cooling, etc.

I will take you through the numbers in a second but first let’s take a look at pictures that compare the storage systems that were tested by Avere, NetApp, and EMC/Isilon.

As you can see, Avere packs the highest performance and lowest latency into a package that is 79% smaller than NetApp and 65% smaller than EMC/Isilon.

Overall size is an approximate measure of the capital and operating expenses. Let’s dig deeper into the actual numbers. In the below table I have included the pertinent comparison data. As you can see from the below, Avere is 51-77% less cost, requires 56-78% fewer disks, and occupies 64-76% fewer rack units.

SPECsfs2008 does not measure power or cooling requirements. In a storage system, the disk drives are the largest consumers of power and dissipaters of heat. Therefore, a good estimate for the power and cooling savings is the disk savings, where Avere is 56-78% less.

Prior to Avere’s SPECsfs2008 posting, NetApp and EMC/Isilon waged a war of words contrasting their SPECsfs2008 results in the body and comments of this blog. It’s a highly recommended read. Make sure to read the comments. With the Avere results now out, the NetApp and EMC/Isilon battle is over 2nd and 3rd place, with Avere taking 1st in all the major categories.

Hope to see you at SC11.

SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECsfs®2008 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of Nov 15, 2011. Above we compare all SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 results that achieved 1,000,000 ops/sec throughput or higher. For the latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/sfs2008.

Tagged: capex, EMC, file server latency, file server performance, Isilon, NAS latency, NAS performance, NetApp, NFS latency, NFS performance, opex, ORT, overall response time, Performance, SPEC, SPECsfs2008

NAS Optimization for the Cloud

Jeff Tabor — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:42:15 +0000

There’s lots of buzz in the storage industry about the cloud. To date, however, the cloud has been impractical for most primary applications because the high-latency WAN connection between the cloud providers and the cloud clients has resulted in poor performance. That’s where Avere comes in…

Avere’s NAS Optimization enables using the cloud for primary applications. The Avere FXT Series uses intelligent tiering to automatically store active data near the client, eliminating the latency of the WAN. Customers are using our cloud solution in four data access scenarios:

1) Remote Office to Datacenter: Data storage is consolidated in a centralized datacenter and Avere is used at the edge to provide low-latency access to remote users.

2) Datacenter to Datacenter: Avere enables compute resources to be shared across multiple datacenters by automatically placing the data actively being processed near the compute nodes and eliminating the WAN latency between the datacenters.

3) Enterprise to Compute Cloud: Enterprises are deploying lower cost compute infrastructures, both in private cloud and public cloud models, by co-locating Avere clusters with the compute nodes to automatically tier and store the active data.

4) Enterprise to Storage Cloud: Avere enables storage clouds for primary applications by placing Avere clusters near the clients, whether in a datacenter, a remote office, or a cloud compute facility, to automatically tier and store the data that the client is actively using.

Check out our cloud solution brief for more.

Enterprise-wide NAS Cloud

Tagged: cloud, NAS latency, NAS performance, NFS latency, NFS performance, Tiered NAS

NAS Optimization for VMware

Jeff Tabor — Fri, 20 May 2011 14:39:45 +0000

VMware is everywhere and I’m very excited about the traction we’re seeing here. Across software build, database, virtual desktop, and other guest applications, customer are finding great value in placing an intelligent read/write caching tier in front of their existing NAS systems. Here are some highlights I’ve heard from customers.

• VMware is a write-heavy app and Avere’s write caching provides a huge performance boost.
• Avere block-level caching efficiently uses SSD/SAS tiers of FXT clusters, especially when using VMware Linked Clones.
• Avere’s NAS Optimization is faster than SAN and simpler to manage and scale.
• The Avere user interface provides great visibility into VMware operations, including ESX hosts, VMs, and VMDKs.
• Storage VMotion makes adding FXT clusters in front of existing NAS systems simple and non-disruptive.
• Storing VMDKs on inexpensive & high-density SATA and accelerating with Avere is much cheaper than storing all VMDKs on SAS/FC.

Check out our VMware solution brief for more.

Avere is VMware Ready certified.

Tagged: NAS performance, NFS performance, Performance, SSD, tiering, virtualization, VMware

Global Namespace and the Path to NAS 2.0

Ron Bianchini — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:17:32 +0000

In the little over a year that we have been shipping our FXT Scale-out NAS Appliance, we have received very positive feedback on our product and its ability to scale NAS performance. Performance scaling is the result of both our Tiered File System (TFS), which dynamically allocates frequently used blocks to faster storage media, and our clustering technology which clusters up to 25 appliances together to linearly scale performance.

Our primary objective has been to increase NAS efficiency by off-loading filer operations and facilitating the use of high density, low power media for mass bulk storage. It is common for our customers to perform the same or more processing as traditional NAS with 1/5th of the data center resources (rack space, power & cooling).

Our customers typically characterize our product as the “user or client facing side of NAS” and the traditional filer as the “archive or data management part”. The most frequent request from our customers has been “Now that you implement the client facing side of NAS, can you do something to help with our NAS clutter?”

NAS Clutter

Storage administrators traditionally have scaled their environment first by adding expensive, power hungry and low density performance disks behind a single filer until that filer becomes over loaded, and second by adding more filers to their environment. Over time, this results in NAS clutter – a multi-filer environment in which the user or client machines must be aware of (and re-configured with) any changes in the storage environment.

Click here for the full-sized image

NAS clutter is the result of the current NAS 1.0 architecture that was not built to scale performance or handle the challenges of geographically distributed users. The NAS filer is the single bottleneck in the NAS environment – all operations from all users must transit the filer, much like single CPU processors were the bottleneck in computers until the advent of multi-core architectures. The NAS 1.0 architecture worked well a decade ago but has severe limitations today.

Click here for the full-sized image

Towards NAS 2.0

In our product announcement last week, we introduced global namespace, or GNS, functionality to the FXT product line. Using GNS our customers can now create a single logical namespace in the FXT cluster, which is visible to all clients that mount any FXT Appliance. The storage administrator can then configure any export on any filer in their data center to be a sub-tree within that namespace. A single common view is presented to all users or clients, effectively eliminating NAS clutter.

Click here for the full-sized image

Global namespace and the virtualization of storage resources is an important building block for scaling out the NAS architecture. When you combine global namespace with Avere’s dynamic media tiering and scale-out clustering you have the genesis of NAS 2.0:

Global namespace removes NAS clutter from the user view – separating the client facing NAS services from datacenter administration.
Dynamic media tiering and scale-out clustering hide mass storage and WAN latency, facilitating the use of high density (low cost, low power) media and remote Cloud storage.

NAS 2.0 and Cloud Storage

NAS 2.0 provides the right combination of global namespace and performance scaling to finally make cloud storage a reality for enterprise applications. Current cloud storage deployments are typically relegated to backup and data protection applications, due to the high latency to transit the WAN. Because of that latency, enterprise application performance would suffer and live users would see unacceptably high latency to their data.

Avere’s performance scaling permits enterprise applications and end users to access remote storage with no degradation in performance over local storage. The deployment model places an Avere FXT cluster near enterprise applications or end users. Storage can be located anywhere. The added benefit of GNS in this model is that storage components can be located at several locations with a single access point for all users at all locations – creating a single view of storage for distributed enterprises. GNS effectively hides the additional clutter of multiple locations for these distributed enterprises.

In summary, GNS is a fundamental component of a NAS 2.0 architecture, whether its within the data center, in the cloud or a hybrid of both. In my next post, I’ll explore more fully how NAS 2.0 enables cloud access.

Tagged: cloud, global namespace, GNS, NAS 2.0

Storage Tiering is Tops in Storage Magazine’s 2011 Hot Technologies

Rebecca Thompson — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 18:56:43 +0000

With less than two weeks left to go until 2011, it’s time for publications to roll out their predictions for the coming year. Storage Magazine has put together a list of what its editors and experts will be the hottest technologies in storage in the coming year. Coming in at #1 is automated storage tiering in its debut on the hot technology annual list, ahead of cloud storage services, primary storage de-dupe and others. Why is tiering so hot? It’s all about the Flash and intelligent use of it:

“It was very difficult to be able to afford enough SSD if you were purely going to use it as a static storage device,” noted Mark Peters, a senior analyst at Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “Now that people will be able to combine tiering with a smaller amount of SSD, I think the two go hand in glove.”

The article goes on to give out sage advice on how to choose a tiering solution and separate hype from reality:

Product differentiators include the level of granularity at which the data moves between tiers, the degree of automation and the extent to which users can define policies.

Wait a minute – that criteria seems very, very familiar to us, it’s just missing the part about the ability to work in a heterogeneous environment.

At any rate, we’re glad that Storage Magazine recognizes how important dynamic storage tiering is in building out high performance, cost effective storage networks – we couldn’t agree more. Here’s to 2011!