More and more of what we do these days at work and at play requires fast access to data. One of the most popular pastimes online today is a 100-player, app-like video game that is being played by over 125 million people worldwide. That’s a lot of data from a lot of people who expect a very high quality of service. Of course, you don’t have to be a pop-culture phenomenon to have customers who want data that is constantly updated, usable anywhere and offers quantifiable metrics to measure your success. Fast access to data matters, and the best way to get there is by working together.
The Importance of Responsiveness
In order to stay competitive and to deliver data services for apps across the data center, as well as private and hybrid clouds, your data architecture needs to support both high performance and cost sensitive workloads.
Performance is a combination of IOPS (input/output operations per second), latency and throughput. However, what customers often care about most is response time. In some cases, the faster the response time the more value is delivered.
For example, online retailers are acutely aware that even a very small delay in the time a page is presented to a customer can result in a drop in revenue. In one case, Google Search found that a 400-millisecond delay resulted in a -0.59% reduction in searches per user. Users respond to speed. Higher responsiveness is something e-business can turn into a competitive advantage.
Overall, storage performance is measured by whether it is fast enough to meet the demands of data intensive workloads now, and also gives us the ability to quickly adopt new technologies in the future.
Working Together
The Datera engineering team recently tested the latest Intel Optane flash technology with the Datera Data Services Platform. Datera provides a 100 percent software-based approach that delivers enterprise-class performance and low latency to applications and users with a cloud-ready, dynamic infrastructure designed to scale.
In its quest to power ever-faster devices and serve increasingly demanding applications, Intel continues to introduce new upgrades to its products. Optane is Intel’s trademarked name for a new class of hyper-fast memory modules. It is based on a technology called 3D Xpoint, in which memory cells sit in a three-dimensional mesh. The consumer M.2 Optane modules are meant to work as a cache memory bridge between RAM and storage, allowing for faster data transfer between the memory, storage, and processor. It is available for conventional storage at the consumer level, and there is an industrial-class Intel Optane storage drive that mounts directly to a PCI express slot.
We tested Intel® Optane™ with Datera to see if it can accelerate applications, reduce transaction costs for latency-sensitive workloads, and reduce total-cost-of-ownership in the overall data center.
The goal of the testing was to show what is possible when high performance software-defined storage is run with high performance media. Here’s what we found:
Read Latency Stack
Datera software has been engineered to deliver maximum performance. This relentless focus on performance delivers extremely fast response times while enabling a rich set of data services. By pairing Datera super-fast software with Intel super-fast media, we can deliver exceptional application response times in real world environments.
The 107-microsecond latency was measured at the application in this case, a load generation tool, the Flexible I/O tester, FIO, and represents:
- Standard iSCSI protocol
- Standard TCP networking
- Time to traverse the network
- Datera Data Services Platform IO path
- Reading the data from the Media
The testing environment presented represents a “real world” environment which consists of 25G Mellanox networking for clients and 100G networking for Datera internal traffic using a low-cost Mellanox SN2100 switch. The client was setup in accordance with Datera best practices for production deployments with full redundancy. Datera software deployment and configuration took less than 2 hours, including the OS load.
In March, Intel announced the availability of the Optane DIMMs, bringing 3D XPoint memory onto the DDR4 memory bus. The modules that have been known under the Apache Pass codename will be branded as Optane DC Persistent Memory, to contrast with Optane DC SSDs. We look forward to running it with the Datera data services platform.
Can you go Faster?
Yes.
Datera takes a 100% software-based approach to data services for high performance applications. This helps you manage your data as it spans traditional, heterogeneous and high-distributed environments. Serving as a single data layer, it can automatically integrate mixed storage platforms, such as SSDs, HDDs, or hybrid and then seamlessly match the workload to the right storage media. New levels of performance are available through collaboration with flash and persistent memory technology leaders Intel and Samsung, as well as expanded global reach with active-active stretch clusters that transcend legacy data silos.
Data automation, self-driving orchestration and ability to scale with operational control while you mix and match applications and infrastructure to your specific needs are among the unique benefits Datera customers use to gain an advantage in the market. And, this level of performance is delivered without any footprint in the host. Configurations and certifications with top server providers, including HPE, Dell and Cisco, also make it easier for you to attain the benefits of Datera with your hardware vendor of choice.
More plainly, Datera is dedicated to improving data storage by providing a “future proof architecture” with maximum performance that gives you the ability to adopt new technologies faster than ever. Have we finished maximizing the performance of your data storage? I think we’re just getting started.
Want to learn more about the testing? Or, if you are ready to achieve high-performance with continuous availability on commodity hardware and reduce your storage infrastructure total-cost-of-ownership by as much as 70%, Contact us to schedule a free consultation