In Enhanced performance, speed to access data and reduction in cost is the prima facie of any customer requirement. Against this backdrop, businesses are moving to all-flash systems to boost critical application performance, gain efficiencies and strategically deploy resources for data management.
Going by this need, and as part of its strategic initiative to driveFlash technology further into the enterprise to help organisations better tackle the mounting challenges of big data, IBM announced flash caching in System x and tiering in Power Systems and brought in FlashSystem family, a comprehensive flash portfolio to help businesses and enterprises to speed big data analytics.
The Company invested $1 billion inFlash and opened new Centers of Competencyfor client engagements believing that Flash, a highly efficient re-writable memory, can speed the response times of information gathering in servers and storage systems from milliseconds to microseconds orders of magnitude faster.
Business Made Easy with Flash
Ajay Mittal, Director, Systems and Technology Group, India/SA, says, Because it contains no moving parts, the technology is also more reliable, durable and more energy efficient than spinning hard drives.
He also finds integrating Flash with the data centre and virtualisation in a heterogeneous framework made Flash even more sought after.
Such benefits have ledFlash storageto pervade the consumer electronics industry and be built into everything from cell phones to tablets. Today, as organisations are challenged by swelling data volumes, increasing demand for faster analytic insights, and rising data center energy costs,Flashis quickly becoming a key requirement to enable the Smarter Enterprise.
The economics and performance ofFlashare at a point where the technology can have a revolutionary impact on enterprises, especially for transaction-intensive applications. The confluence of Big Data, social, mobile and cloud technologies is creating an environment in the enterprise that demands faster, more efficient, access to business insights, andFlashcan provide that access quickly, says Mittal.
Mittal emphasised the point that management of the storage becomes much easy using Flash technology, which also promises a reduction in cost.
To help lead this transformation,IBMtoday is investing $1 billion in research and development to design, create and integrate new Flashsolutions into its expanding portfolio of servers, storage systems and middleware.
As part of that commitment, the company also announced plans to open 12 Centers of Competency around the globe. These sites will enable clients to run proof-of-concept scenarios with real-world data to measure the projected performance gains that can be achieved withIBMFlash storage solutions. Clients will see first-hand howIBMFlashsolutions can provide real-time decision support for operational information, and help improve the performance of mission-critical workloads, such as credit card processing, stock exchange transactions, manufacturing and order processing systems.
IBMFlashSystem 820, for example, is the size of a pizza box, and is 20 times faster than spinning hard drives, and can store up to 24 terabytes of data.
Mittal reiterates that Flashsystems can provide up to 90 per cent reductions in transaction times for applications like banking, trading, and telecommunications; up to 85 per cent reductions in batch processing times in applications like enterprise resource planning and business analytics; and up to 80 per cent reductions of energy consumption in data center consolidations and cloud deployments.
Cost-Benefit Factor
For instance, according to Mittal, the customer can see a reduction in per dollar cost per iOPs using Flash, as against SATA or SAS drives.
Mittal vouches for the fact that the technology in a typical system configuration, and a maximum system configuration
can return over 1,400,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) at less than 1 millisecond average response time.
The differentiating factor is IBM SVC which is widely regarded as an industry-leading standard when it comes to storage
virtualisation which is a single point of management and control for small and large heterogeneous storage environments used with flash for better performance.
The outcome is best when SVC and FlashSystem 820 are configured together, says Mittal.
Best Flash Practice
As a best practice, when configuring multiple IO group SVC clusters, customers need to zone every node so that it can
access FlashSystem 820. If you configure multiple FlashSystem 820 ports, repeat the zoning so that every SVC node has access to every FlashSystem 820 port.
Logical configuration on FlashSystem
- To provide usable storage (managed disks) on SVC, you need to define some logical units (LUs) on FlashSystem 820, and map these LUs to the FlashSystem host ports.
- Create at least four LUs on FlashSystem 820 storage, and use default masking to map all of the LUs to all of the FlashSystem 820 host ports.
- When you create zoning, each managed disk (mdisk) discovered by SVC will have eight available paths between each SVC node and the FlashSystem port
- The tested configurations, for example using 4 LUs or 16 LUs using varying FlashSystem 820 capacity to test 25 per cent, 50 per cent, and 100 per cent allocation. That is, with 4 LUs and
50 per cent allocation, each LU was approximately 2.5 TB in size. Similarly, with 16 LUs and 50 per cent allocation, each LU was approximately 625 GB in size.
If you use FlashSystem 820 as the primary data storage, as with the test results here, add all of the mdisks from the controller to a single managed disk group (also known as a storage pool
in the SVC GUI). If more than one FlashSystem 820 is being presented to an SVC cluster, a best practice would be to create a single storage pool per controller.
If you use FlashSystem 820 with the SVC EasyTier function, you will likely want to create multiple LUs for each hybrid storage pool. Create four or more LUs per hybrid pool, with the combined capacity of these LUs matching the capacity that you want for the SSD tier in that pool.
Customer Forte
As a testimony to the performance of Flash, IBMs customer Sprint Nextel Corp installed nine flash storage systems at its data center, for a total of 150 TB of additional Flash storage. The objective was to improve the performance and efficiency of its phone activation application. Increase in performance enabled the enterprise to expand its technology to other parts of the data center.
Flash technology seems to add value to the retail enterprises as well. As Mittal explains, One of our retail customers wanted to boost system performance to ensure fast, reliable access to its online catalogue. The customer chose to replace disk-based storage with solid-state storage technology from Texas Memory Systems (TMS), an IBM Company.
The customer currently operates two pairs of TMS RAM-based RamSan-440 and flash-based RamSan-710 systems.
To solve its I/O bottleneck, the company moved high-volume Oracle database tables to the RamSan storage. Unlike disk-based storage, no extra optimiSation or third-party application tuning was required to extract maximum performance from the RamSan.
As the popularity of its online platform continued to grow over the years, the retailer needed more performance, and today operates with two TMS RamSan-440 systems, deployed in a mirrored high-availability configuration with redundant data paths over 8-Gbit Fibre Channel connections.
The benefit that the company observed, according to Mittal, was eliminating storage bottlenecks to deliver the consistently high performance that needs to support its e-retail platform, even as web traffic has increased by more than 50 per cent.
PoCs in Progress
Customers across various industry verticals seem to be going in for proof of concept with regard to Flash technology and its benefits. IBM is looking at about nearly 100 customers who are keen on moving to Flash. Besides this, service providers are seriously looking at Flash for their cloud-based storage model and capacity planning.
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