House of Cards. IaaS without storage performance testing. Howard Marks, Deep Storage Len Rosenthal, Load DynamiX

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House of Cards

IaaS without storage

performance testing

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Your NOT So Humble Speaker



25+ years of consulting and

writing for trade press



Columnist/blogger at

NetworkComputing.com



Chief Scientist DeepStorage, LLC



Independent test lab and analysts



@DeepStorageNet on Twitter

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Today’s Agenda

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What do we mean by IaaS?



Why IaaS is for the corporate

datacenter?



The three types of IaaS storage



How IaaS makes life difficult for

storage

▸

The I/O blender and other hypervisor effects

▸

Users choose their storage level

▸

Noisy neighbors have a lease

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Infrastructure As A Service?



Self service meets virtualization



Users create VM from service

catalog through web interface

▸

CPU, memory, storage capacity, storage class



Can be delivered several ways

▸

Public (eg: AWS, Microsoft Azure)

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Private (eg: VMware vCAC, Openstack, Cloudstack)

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IaaS Drivers



Agility

▸

Workload deployment shrinks from days to minutes

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Workloads billed by the hour

•

Ideal for seasonal, temporary workloads

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Encourages users to release unneeded resources

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Can lead to higher utilization

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Storage = IaaS Magic



Scaling the compute side of IaaS

is science

▸

Just manage the vCPU to core ratio



Storage for IaaS is still an art form

▸

Storage costs vary over 10X for same capacity

•

Therefore, a large fraction of total costs

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Storage guy metrics like IOPS alien to users

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Poor visibility into how applications affect storage

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IaaS Storage Types



Non-persistent

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Block storage that’s released when VM shutdown

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Persistent block storage

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Eg: Amazon EBS, Openstack Cinder

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Dynamically provisioned, traditional storage

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Object Storage

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The cheap stuff eg: Amazon S3

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Block Storage in Classes

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Defined in orchestration layer

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Media

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SSD, hybrid, spinning disk, Etc.

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Data protection

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RAID level, replication, snapshot schedule

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Hopefully storage QoS

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Minimum IOPS, IOPS quota

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Priority

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The Cloud’s Dark Side



Cloud providers have no visibility

▸

Into how storage will be used

▸

Into the application

•

So APM tools limited value

▸

Into future requirements



The user/customer buys 200GB

of Silver

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That may be a WORN archive or real time trading database

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They may make it 2TB overnight

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Virtualization is Hard on Storage



Disk drives like sequential

workloads

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When multiple VMs do sequential

I/O they’re multiplexed together

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That throws I/O into a blender…

all I/O is now random I/O!

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Enter the Noisy Neighbor

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Pre virtualization storage

performance managed by

spindles

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More IOPS, more 15K RPM drives

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Each app had dedicated spindles



In IaaS multiple VMs, from

different users, share a volume



When marketing re-indexes

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Can’t I Just Throw Flash At It?



Flash based SSDs do provide

lots of IOPS

▸

But even all flash arrays have their limits

•

and most of us can’t afford them



Hybrid solutions are application

sensitive

▸

How much flash? How to deploy?



Storage performance validation

with load testing can reveal:

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How much flash you need

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How your system will react to new workloads, noisy neighbors

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Storage Performance Validation

A key to successful IaaS

July 24, 2014

Len Rosenthal

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Who is Load DynamiX?

Leader in Storage Performance Validation

Putting your storage technologies to the test

Provide insight into storage infrastructure behavior to assure performance & optimize cost for public and private clouds

Market entry March 2009; Privately-held Santa Clara, CA

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Software: Load DynamiX Enterprise

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Hardware: LDX Series load generation

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Go Daddy Overview

 World’s largest web hosting provider: 5+ million accounts

 Over 50 million domain names under management

 3300 employees; 600+ IT developers, 5 storage admins

IT Challenge

 Determine most cost-effective storage systems to support

31PB growing 30% annually with 99.999% uptime across 5 data centers

Solution

 Multiple Load DynamiX 10G Series appliances

Go Daddy Benefits

 Projected storage cost savings of 65% over 2 years

 Full confidence that their storage systems can support

projected workloads “Load DynamiX is like my smart phone – I can’t imagine my life without it!” Julia Palmer Manager, Performance Engineering Go Daddy

Storage Performance Validation

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Attaining IaaS Enlightenment

Validate with

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

Test in production and pray Validate with freeware tools (Iometer, etc.) Evolution

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Storage Performance Validation Process

In 3 Simple Steps

Create

Model

Create storage workload emulations from production data or use our sample workloads.

Analyze

Results

Find performance limits. Compare

latency, throughput & IOPS of different

products and configs.

Run

Tests

Connect storage systems to Load DynamiX load generation appliance and run the tests.

1 2 3

Deploy In Production with

Iterate on different products & configurations

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Go Daddy Production Workload

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C

ost

per G

B

OS & Disk Change 56% drop Vendor B 23% drop Add Compression 35% drop Dedupe/Compression 62% drop Vendor C 56% drop Whitebox 67% drop

Every transition validated with Load DynamiX

Storage Cost Optimization

Driving cost optimization through technology validation

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Benefits to Go Daddy by Using Load DynamiX

Faster Validation

Weeks to test in lab, not 12 months in

production

Storage Engineer

Superior Storage ROI

Pick most cost effective solution for workload

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Q&A Session

Howard Marks DeepStorage.net