Microsoft Windows Server in a Flash
Combine Violin’s enterprise-class storage with the ease and flexibility of Windows Storage Server
in an integrated solution so you can achieve higher performance and efficiency for your business
critical Microsoft applications.
Abstract
Microsoft Windows Server scales to support large servers in the datacenter. Yet legacy storage solutions are keeping Windows Server applications from reaching their full potential. The ideal storage solution would deliver enterprise-class high-performance storage that is tightly integrated with the Windows
environment and holistically managed by native Windows tools and utilities. This would increase the value of existing human and technology investments while transforming application performance and economics. The end result is enhanced business efficiency, resiliency, and ROI for all of IT.
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 3
Performance challenges in Windows Server environments ... 3
Higher performance storage for Windows Server ... 4
Violin Windows Flash Array + Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 ... 4
Microsoft ecosystem friendly ... 5
What is SMB Direct? ... 5
Resiliency for continuous availability ... 5
Scalability to grow efficiently ... 6
Use cases ... 6
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 ... 6
Windows Server Hyper-V ... 7
Private Cloud ... 8
Introduction
Microsoft® technology has grown far beyond that of simple workgroup applications. Windows® Server applications and Hyper-V® virtualization are mature technologies that are considered by many to be business critical. As businesses grow, they expect their Windows environments grow with them; however, limitations in the current IT infrastructure have made achieving this goal difficult, if not impossible. The ideal solution would deliver enterprise-class high-performance storage that is tightly integrated with the Windows environment and holistically managed by native Windows tools and utilities. The IT staff and the user community would benefit from a rich set of file and storage services that transform Windows
application performance while improving efficiency, resiliency, and ROI for all of IT.
Performance challenges in Windows Server environments
Microsoft Windows Server scales to support large servers in the datacenter. As a result, enterprise
technologies such as SQL Server®, SharePoint®, Exchange Server, and Hyper-V are now common in the datacenter. Although CPU performance and network connectivity has grown dramatically over the past several years, improvements in storage have largely been limited to increased capacity, not performance. Legacy storage solutions (disk drives) perform best when read and write operations are sequential. Yet modern workloads such as SQL Server databases and Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) are filled with random I/O requests, which results in high latency and a negative impact on application performance. Various striping techniques, solid-state drives, and optimization algorithms seek to improve operations yet I/O performance remains lacking. To compensate, IT managers over provision storage and/or add cache to controllers in an attempt to garner enough I/O capacity; however, this approach is inefficient and enforces continued spending on capacity when the need is actually for IOPS.
Poor storage performance leads to poor CPU utilization and can negatively affect available network bandwidth. CPUs spend more time waiting than executing, which means expensive servers are mostly idle investments. In an attempt to scale beyond the workgroup level, some IT directors have ported Windows applications to another storage platform such as a SAN, or different applications altogether. For example, former SQL Server data may have “graduated” to an Oracle implementation. However, such a migration may be viewed as a potential loss of control by the line of business owner. Another way to raise server utilization is virtualization. Yet ironically, virtualization drives random I/O even higher and some virtualization solutions raise server overhead. All of this I/O crossing the network consumes bandwidth that might be put to better use. Organizations are faced with an unpleasant reality that their only choice in responding to growth has meant scaling the inherent inefficiency and expense of legacy storage solutions. When SANs are deployed, they typically require vendor-specific tools and skill sets. Organizations cannot easily leverage the management skills of their existing Microsoft-savvy staff, which reduces flexibility and increases operational expense. This is just one shortcoming of bifurcated storage where Ethernet-based storage is the norm for file services (the bulk of the Microsoft universe), and dedicated block-based storage supports high-performance applications such as SQL Server, Hyper-V, etc.
Higher performance storage for Windows Server
To address the shortcomings of legacy storage in Microsoft environments, Violin Memory and Microsoft have co-developed the Violin Windows Flash Array (WFA). The WFA combines Violin’s patented flash storage optimization algorithms, Microsoft’s fast SMB Direct protocol, and Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 so your Windows environments can have storage that easily keeps up with your needs.
Violin Windows Flash Array + Windows Storage Server 2012 R2
The WFA is based upon the enterprise-class Violin Flash Array 6000 series all flash storage array that features global hot spares and no single point of failure. Dual memory gateways run Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 with support for SMB Direct through RDMA-enabled network cards. The WFA architecture features sub-millisecond latency and wide stripe vRAID accelerated switched memory for maximum performance. SMB Direct runs at PCIe speeds to deliver the features of a SAN at the price of NAS with the performance of DAS. With the WFA, you get maximum performance for every byte every time.
Table 1: Violin Windows Flash Arrays by model
Windows Storage Sever 2012 R2 delivers proven storage technologies including SMB 3.0, deduplication, thin provisioning, data mirroring, live migration, Scale-out File Server (SOFS), Storage Spaces, and data
encryption. The SMB 3.0 protocol boosts network storage performance. In particular, SMB Direct (SMB 3.0 over RDMA) enables remotely stored data to be read directly into server memory. Microsoft optimized the Storage Server kernel for tight integration with the WFA to maximize performance. When combined with Violin’s optimized flash technology, the result is remote storage performing like blazing fast local storage. In fact, Microsoft and Violin collaborated extensively to optimize Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 to take full advantage of the enterprise-class performance and resiliency of the Violin Flash Array.
As Windows applications become business critical, ensuring their availability is key. The WFA helps you meet 24x7 operational requirements through multi-layered hardware and software resiliency. Active-Active clustering delivers continuous application uptime and SMB Multichannel ensures that cluster node
connectivity is maintained. Non-disruptive volume extensibility is available through SOFS or thinly provisioned Storage Spaces, so you can add capacity to existing volumes without taking them offline. With the WFA, you can get higher utilization and performance with a smaller, less expensive IT footprint than traditional SANs. You can scale up or out as the future demands. You may find that you no longer need a dedicated SAN or DAS to support your mix of high performance Windows applications.
Windows Flash Array model WFA-64
VIMM Count and VIMM Capacity 64 x 1TiB
Form Factor / Flash type 3U / MLC
Raw Capacity (TiB / TB) 64 / 70
Usable Capacity (TiB / TB)* 40 / 44
I/O Connectivity 10GbE, 56G IB
Maximum 4KB IOPS (Mixed) >750k IOPS
Maximum Bandwidth (100% Reads) 4GB/s
Nominal Latency 500 µsec (mixed)
Microsoft ecosystem friendly
Violin Memory and Microsoft co-developed and optimized the WFA to leverage its unique performance profile. SMB 3.0 and SMB Direct are part of the Microsoft strategic roadmap for network storage and the WFA fully supports these protocols to deliver performance and scalability not available elsewhere.
There is no need for third-party storage management tools or skill sets. Your existing Microsoft admin staff can manage all of your servers, storage, and applications with Microsoft System Center and PowerShell. The tight integration of the WFA with Microsoft management tools delivers a holistic view of your Microsoft environment for simplified and cost-effective management of physical and virtual servers.
What is SMB Direct?
The WFA addresses the traditional bottlenecks that limit performance by delivering a state-of-the-art storage solution where speed, scale, and resiliency combine to deliver operational and financial
efficiency. The use of SMB Direct can improve the performance of most any vendor’s storage and we expect that over time most will offer this support. However, the combination of SMB Direct with Violin flash-based storage uniquely takes performance to the next level. With the WFA, you get ultra-fast file access with sustained throughput of up to 1 million 4K IOPS along with support for large sector (4K) storage.
As illustrated in Figure 1, your servers will spend more time doing than waiting so you can support additional workloads with existing resources and achieve faster response times. Our support for SMB 3.0 delivers a rich set of storage services that will help ensure you can achieve the highest
performance and efficiency.
Figure 1: Wait State Reduction Enabled by Windows Flash Array
Resiliency for continuous availability
With the WFA, you benefit from continuous availability of mission critical applications and databases along with reduced risk to operations through multiple layers of hardware and software based protection.
Scalability to grow efficiently
With faster storage performance, you can optimize CPU investments more effectively across workloads. As illustrated in Figure 2, the superior performance of the WFA will enable your organization to maintain the same performance even as your workloads change. Support for Windows Storage Spaces allows you to scale up to meet growing demand. Alternatively, you can scale out as the WFA also supports Scale-out File Server (SOFS) for non-disruptive volume extensibility. You can scale to four arrays (eight nodes) per cluster. Storage Live Migration streamlines virtual machine (VM) migration through direct WFA to WFA
communication that bypasses the VM host to reduce server impact and complete the process more rapidly.
Figure 2: Customer Observed Performance Improvements, WFA vs. Industry Standard All Flash Array
In addition, Hyper-V does not suffer from the up to 20% overhead of competitive virtualization solutions so you can consolidate workloads such as SQL Server with little, if any, performance penalty.
You can easily deploy development, test, and Q/A scenarios knowing that roll out and roll up will be quick and simple, and the test beds will match the architecture of your production environment. What’s more, the WFA is a very efficient private cloud platform. As you consider the role private clouds may play in your IT infrastructure, be assured that the WFA is a future-proof investment.
Use cases
While the Violin Windows Flash Array delivers superior performance for most any Windows workload, the WFA is particularly suited for transaction-oriented workloads such as databases, and environments with a high degree of random I/O activity including Hyper-V server virtualization, and private cloud architectures.
Microsoft SQL Server 2014
Microsoft SQL Server is a powerful and cost-effective database solution that has become the back-end data store for business applications including OLTP, business intelligence (BI), and data warehouses. Many organizations have grown up around SQL Server; it is an integral part of their business operations. Meeting the demand for data growth and real-time business intelligence has strained databases as legacy storage solutions hit their design limits. By raising the available I/O to meet the demand, the WFA enables SQL Server to spend more time processing data as opposed to waiting for it.
Consolidation or virtualization of SQL Server workloads is unleashed with the WFA. SQL Server can now scale to enterprise workloads while delivering consistent service levels. Our balanced performance
log. Plus, on start-up, in-memory optimized tables are loaded from persistent storage. Until this step is complete, the database cannot go online. The larger the in-memory tables, the longer the startup delay. While in-memory processing can boost transaction speed dramatically, without high performance
persistent storage supporting the rest of the DBMS, database performance will be constrained. When SQL Server 2014 workloads access the WFA through SMB Direct, you get ultra-fast read and write commits.
As illustrated in Figure 3, early customer testing reveals that the WFA delivers up to 50% higher SQL read performance and up to twice the throughput of SQL writes compared with an industry standard all flash array. In addition, connecting through SMB Direct frees up to 30% of CPU usage; these cycles could be put towards other workloads. This means you can optimize CPU investments across SQL Server workloads to achieve greater scale and maintain consistent performance while adding users, threads, tables, LUNs, etc.
Further, storage is simpler and less risky to setup and
manage, as there are no disk groupings, data locality issues, performance mapping or tuning required. Since you can consolidate and scale SQL Server to meet your performance needs, there is no imperative to migrate to another platform. In fact, you may find that the combination of SQL Server and the WFA yields better performance than competitive solutions.
Figure 3: Customer Performance Tests, WFA vs. Industry Standard All Flash Array
Windows Server Hyper-V
Server and application virtualization/consolidation is the future of IT as the financial and operational benefits from improved efficiency are too great to ignore. Yet, virtualization initiatives to date have been constrained by the inefficiency and poor scaling of legacy solutions since virtualization concentrates random I/O requests that overwhelm traditional storage.
Hyper-V virtualization on the WFA provides the ability to deliver a rich portfolio of functions to provide the performance, scale, and availability needed for any critical applications in your enterprise.
Private Cloud
Taking the next step from virtualization to private cloud requires centralized management and seemingly unlimited scalability with consistent performance. The tight integration of Windows Server Hyper-V and Violin hardware delivers the maximum scalability that you need for private cloud deployments.
With management based on System Center and PowerShell instead of a collection of disparate server, network, and storage management tools, existing staff can administer storage resources, which reduces the need for additional skill sets and training. Clustered SOFS lets you can scale out to four arrays (eight nodes) to meet your private cloud requirements. Our PCIe interconnects are array based and SMB Multichannel aggregates network connectivity within the safety of a Windows Failover Cluster.
Maximize your private cloud ROI with greater resource flexibility on a simpler architecture that will be able to scale your present and future workloads with the enterprise-class resiliency for continuous availability.
Conclusion
Legacy storage solutions are built for capacity, not I/O performance. Yet today’s Microsoft environments are performance oriented and this results in complex, expensive, and hard-to-scale solutions being deployed to meet the needs of business critical Windows Server applications.
The Violin Windows Flash Array is a fundamentally different and better storage solution for Microsoft environments that addresses the performance shortcomings of legacy storage. WFA is an all-flash active-active HA multi-node cluster platform with native Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 that delivers rich file and storage services by putting Windows intelligence in the storage array.
Support for the SMB 3.0 protocol and SMB Direct means that your storage runs at PCIe speeds with the features of a SAN with the performance of DAS at the price of NAS. You can unleash your Windows application performance and free up existing resources to do more. In fact, the performance of the WFA is so high that you could choose to eliminate your existing dedicated storage infrastructure that is supporting your high performance applications such as SQL Server databases or Hyper-V virtual machines.
With the WFA, you can simplify your management paradigm with Microsoft System Center and PowerShell to achieve holistic control and flexibility of your Windows-based physical and virtual
infrastructure. You can consolidate and virtualize workloads while maximizing your Windows performance on a storage architecture that is simpler and faster, and on Microsoft’s strategic roadmap at substantial cost savings.
About Violin Memory
Business in a Flash. Violin Memory transforms the speed of business with high performance, always available, low cost management of critical business information and applications. Violin’s All Flash optimized solutions accelerate breakthrough CAPEX and OPEX savings for building the next generation data center. Violin’s Flash Fabric Architecture (FFA) speeds data delivery with chip-to-chassis
performance optimization that achieves lower consistent latency and cost per transaction for Cloud, Enterprise and Virtualized mission-critical applications. Violin's All Flash Arrays and Appliances, and enterprise data management software solutions enhance agility and mobility while revolutionizing
