Intransa – ADIC StorNext
File Sharing Solution
Solution Document
Document Title: Intransa – ADIC StorNext File Sharing Solution Revision: 1.0
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Trademarks
The Intransa logo, Intransa Storage System, StorControl, StorControl Management Tool, IntraStor, and the Simply Smarter logo are all registered trademarks of Intransa, Inc.
Microsoft® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Windows™ is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
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All other brand or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or organization. All names of people and companies used for examples in this manual are fictional. Any similarity to names of real companies and real people is coincidental.
Revisions
Intransa reserves the right to revise this document and the information within at any time and as necessary without the obligation to notify any person of revision.
Contact: Intransa, Inc.
2870 Zanker Road Suite 200 San Jose, CA 95134-2114 Phone: 408.678.8600 Fax: 408.678.8800
Contents
Introduction ... 1
Background ...1
StorNext File System Concept ... 2
Intransa IP SAN Concept ... 3
Installation and Configuration... 5
ADIC StorNext MetaData Server / Clients Installation...5
Asssign Intransa Volumes to StorNext server/clients ...11
StorNext File System Configuration. ...11
Failover Capabilities...27
Limitations...27
Introduction - 1
Introduction
This document describes File Sharing solution based on Intransa Native IP SAN and ADIC StorNext File System.
Background
Traditionally, file sharing has been achieved with NAS due to its simplicity. However, performance of data access over LAN, NFS and CIFS scalability limitations and islands of information (Unix, Windows) have limited NAS adoption in large scaled or high performance applications, especially in video editing applications.
Compared to NAS environments, the SAN File System has the high performance of data access over the SAN and supports a very large capacity of data. It also supports heterogeneous application servers eliminating the islands of information that exist in the NAS environment.
StorNext is a storage area network (SAN)-based, scalable storage management solution, it offers concurrent data sharing in multi-platforms, supports large number of heterogeneous storage devices.
StorNext File System Concept
ADIC StorNext File system consists of two components: Metadata Servers and StorNext clients communicating over IP. Metadata servers can use either IP SAN or DAS, while clients access either FC storage or IP SAN storage known as user storage. User storage pools are shared by many clients. 2 Metadata servers can be configured to provide load-balance and high availability.
Installation and Setup - 3
Intransa IP SAN Concept
Intransa storage system consists of storage controller (SCs) and storage Disk Enclosure (DE). Connections between hosts, SCs and DEs are all through IP networks. Users can use either GUI or CLI to manage the system. System health can be monitored through SNMP.
Intransa IP SAN provides LUNs which can be used as volumes by SFS. All clients (Metadata servers in the future) can access these LUNs using IP network instead of expensive FC network.
LUN creations are policy driven. Policy provides both simplicity and full disk level control. Since each SC can manage multiple DEs, LUNs can have capacity of many TBs by striping across many disk drives. DE only provides physical boundary, to controller, disk in any DEs are the same.
The number of spindles plays an important role in file shared applications. To enable large scale SFS deployment, an underneath scalable storage infrastructure is required; this is exactly what Intransa’s architecture provides – independent on-demand storage capacity scaling and storage performance scaling. With modular product introduction ranging from entry level IP3000 to enterprise level IP7500, with features like flexible RAID [multiple RAID can be provisioned on one DE], dynamically RAID policies [Change from RAID0 to RAID1, for example], snapshot, StorAR [Asynchronous remote replication], load balancing, etc, a combination of Intransa Storage system with IBM SFS provides the best scalable solution for the end users.
Scaling
Performances Scaling Capacity
LAN IP SAN
Windows Linux
Unix
Installation and Configuration- 5
Installation and Configuration
ADIC StorNext File System installation includes metadata server installation and client(s) installation. Client can also be installed on metadata server.
A dedicate physical drive or LUN is required for each file system. Intransa IP SAN provided LUN can be used as metadata storage, however, metadata server has to be manually started whenever there is a metadata server reboot.
ADIC StorNext MetaData Server / Clients
Installation
Installation and Configuration- 7 The only difference between metadata server and client installation is the following dialogue where the user was asked to choose which components to install. If the host is for metadata server, select “server files”, otherwise, select “client files” (you can also install client on server machine too):
Installation and Configuration- 11
Assign Intransa Volumes to StorNext
server/clients
First, assign LUNs to StorNext File sharing system. You can use blocksize 512b or 1K. We haven’t tested blocksize larger than 1K. With blocksize=1K, a single LUN can have more than 2TB. Volume “metav” will be used for metadata storage, while volume “v1” and “v2” will be used for user data storage:
policy create name = 12disksm1 numberOfStripeMembers = 6 stripeElementSize = 64 virtualDiskType = RAID10
policy create name = 12disksm2 numberOfStripeMembers = 6 stripeElementSize = 64 virtualDiskType = RAID10
volume create name = v1 policy = 12disksm1 blockSize = 1k size = 1t
volume create name = v2 policy = 12disksm1 blockSize = 1k size = 1t
volume create name = metav policy = stripeofmirrors size = 200g blockSize = 1k
volume assign name = metav initiatorName = iqn.demo-2 volume assign name = v1 initiatorName = iqn.demo-2 volume assign name = v2 initiatorName = iqn.demo-2
volume assign name = v1 initiatorName = iqn.demo-3 cluster = yes
volume assign name = v2 initiatorName = iqn.demo-3 cluster = yes
StorNext File System Configuration.
Now, on StorNext metadata server, configure/login iSCSI initiator, and then running “Disk Device Labeler”:
Installation and Configuration- 13 Use CvfsDisk0 as the metadata storage. Now, configure a file system called “video-fs”. Start “Configuration Administrator”:
Installation and Configuration- 19 Delete “RegularFiles” entry since we are not using this group.
Now, “new” two stripe groups: “metagroup” using CvfsDisk0 and “datagroup” using “CvfsDisk1 and CvfsDisk2”:
Click “OK” and save the file to “video-fs.cfg”. video-fs will be the name of the file system.
Installation and Configuration- 23 After saving configuration file, format the file system using cvmkfs:
Start “StorNext File System Administrator”, under file tab, run “start file system” and “activate file system”.
You should see following display [You may need to reboot the system]:
Now start “StorNext File System Control Parameters”, which will map between file system name and driver letter:
Installation and Configuration- 25 System will be asked to reboot in order for this mapping started. Reboot the system.
After the system restarts, run “Disk Device Lableler” to enable the StorNext to recognize iSCSI devices (because iSCSI service started later than StorNext Service).
Now add file system “video-fs” into startup list by running “FSS Start Up List” so that system will automatically start file system “video-fs” when system restarts:
If MetaData Storage is using iSCSI services, run “StorNext File System Administrator” to start and activate file system.
Installation and Configuration- 27 Issues: Put “Disk Device Labeler” into system “startup” so that it will be executed every time there is a system reboot.
Failover Capabilities
Storage controller or iSCSI link failover is not transparent for StorNext File system. Manually, “Disk device labeler” has to be executed whenever there is a failure. We expect this will be handled by a later version of StorNext File system.
Limitations
File system maximum number of clients in one file system: 128 Maximum number of LUNs from StorNext: 512
Maximum LUNs in single stripe group: 32. This is also the maximum number of Intransa Storage controllers StorNext file system can address in single stripe group. With 32 Intransa controllers, close to 3GBps throughput can be achieved. Maximum number of stripe groups: 128
Performance
We didn’t perform any directory/folder deletion and creation tests since this is a metadata server performance characteristic. We concentrate on data path performance instead.
From a single host with single controller, close to 80MBps Read or Write performance can be achieved.
With each user running 8MBps read and 8MBps write, we plot the CPU utilization and average response time as we add more users to the system. The volume layout is 2 20DiskStripeOfMirrors for a total 40 disks, 2 volumes are distributed on 2 separate Intransa Controllers, and the StorNext file system is created on the top of these 2 volumes using striping.
With 2 Storage controllers, system can sustain over 160MBps (corresponding 10 users in the graph).
Intransa, Inc.
2870 Zanker Road Suite 200 San Jose, CA 95134-2114 Phone: 408.678.8600 Fax: 408.678.8800
