The first SSDs in our storage arrays were advertised with 2500-3500 IOps per drive. Much quicker than spinning drives, looking at the recommended 140 IOps for a 10k SAS drive. But it was in fact still easy to overload a set of SSDs and reach its max throughput, especially when they were used in a (undersized) caching tier.
A year or so later, when you started adding more flash to a system, the collective “Oomph!” of the Flash drives would overload other components in the storage system. Systems were designed based on spinning media so with the suddenly faster media, busses and CPUs were hammered and couldn’t keep up.
Queue all sorts of creative ways to avoid this bottleneck: faster CPUs, upgrades from FC to multi-lane SAS. Or bigger architectural changes, such as offloading to IO caching cards in the servers themselves (e.g. Fusion-io cards), scale-out systems, etc.
Troubleshooting any system requires information about the configuration of the system and how it’s behaving over time. Unsurprisingly, this is also valid when you’re troubleshooting performance on a Dell EMC VNX. So help your storage engineer, and enable performance data logging on the VNX!
Excelero Storage launched their NVMesh product back in March 2017 at Storage Field Day 12. NVMesh is a software defined storage solution using commodity servers and NVMe devices. Using NVMesh and the Excelero RDDA protocol, we saw some mind blowing performance numbers, both in raw IOps and in latency, while keeping hardware and licensing costs low.
Earlier this year Nimble Storage announced their all-flash array called the Predictive Flash Platform; you can read my thoughts on the launch over