QNAP Auto Tiering com a Nova Series TS.ECX80 SAS

Notas do Editor

• #3: SSD will soon shift its focus from MLC to TLC and the price will continually drop. But the MLC SSD is still the dominant in enterprise IT. We would likely to see 3D NAND capacity expansion in the following year. PCIe usage will also continue to grow, but it is limited by its lack of expandability, is not hot-swappable, and has a high price. Hence, 12G SAS SSD has the best potential to be the trend. Or SATA with higher revision (SATA 3.0 and above) can be paired with PCIe as the interface for RAID controller.
• #4: QNAP has produced full SSD storage years ago. The price is very high along with its super high performance. Has anyone ever acquired full SSD storage? There must be not many. In addition to the rack’s high cost, the use of all SSD makes the storage acquisition unattainable. This brings up our topic of today, “ how can we build high-capacity storage while achieving high performance?”
• #5: QNAP engineered 2.5” and 3.5” hybrid storage appliances to provide high-capacity storage while maintaining performance comparable to a full-SSD storage solution. TVS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP can accommodate 6 2.5” and 9 3.5” HDDS to achieve multi-tiered storage architecture with 12G high-speed data transfer.
• #6: Let’s compare TVS-EC1580MU with a full-SSD solution, as both are in 2U form factor. The QNAP TVS-EC1580MU with the built-in Qtier outperforms full-SSD storage in capacity (4 times bigger) and is more advantageous in price/performance than full-SSD storage. Therefore, the TVS-EC1580MU achieves the goal of high-capacity with performance comparable to SSD.
• #7: Qtier supports the following 3 tiers: Ultra-high performance (超高效能) Performance (效能) Capacity (高容量) Let’s take 1580MU as an example: We configured RAID 10 (or RAID 5) on the system using 6x 2.5” SSD and RAID 5 (or RAID 6) Nearline SAS or SATA Drive. With Qtier, the system will automatically move frequently used data to Ultra high performance tier (SSD) and rarely used data to capacity tier.
• #8: Qtier is a block-based data migration technology, and the block size for data detection and calculation is 4MB. QNAP adopts B-tree update algorithm to give each data block a calculated weight. Data blocks with higher weights means higher frequency of data access and will therefore move to high-performance tier, e.g., moving data from a HDD RAID group to an SSD RAID group. The Qtier technology also makes sure that data migration and metadata update will not interfere with normal I/O. Moreover, data integrity can be achieved by leveraging the transaction-based B-tree update algorithm.
• #9: In addition to setting data migration schedule and priority, you can also define auto-tiering policy to migrate data according to your application’s requirements. You can set up migration schedule at night or when you do not require services to improve the overall data migration efficiency.
• #10: Let’s take a look at this block diagram. The system will move data based on the calculated data access frequency and schedule, e.g. moving cold data to high-capacity and hot data to high speed tier. To maintain data integrity, data migration will not interfere normal data I/O.
• #11: According to report in the Qtier app in QTS, it shows how the data has been moved (e.g. from which tier to which tier) and the time spent for migration .
• #12: ??Built-in 256GB SSD cache. Qtier technology support both auto tiering and SSD cache simultaneously. SSD cache aims to improve cache hit rate by moving frequently-accessed randomly-read data to SSD cache. On the other hand, Qtier moves data accordingly to data analysis results and schedule.
• #13: In QNAP lab, we used two E5-2600 servers (each with 6 core, 12 threads) and a total of 24 workers to test their performance. The result is : 100% 4k random read IOPs is 60,000, response time is 0.1ms. We can see the LEDS on SSD keeps flashing to indicate that most I/O operations are on the SSDs.
• #14: Login VSI is used for testing server/storage performance in VM. In QNAP lab, we set up RAID 10 configuration with 6 x 2.5” SSD (each having 500G) and RAID 6 with 3.5” NL-SAS . We used two E5 servers and mount TVS-EC1580MU to the server. And created 150 Virtual machines using Login VSI create. The result is about 2xxx milliseconds. The TVS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP completed the full test without exceeding the average response time latency threshold.
• #16: Why SAS? Not only they are known for its high reliability and MTBF, the next generation SAS controller utilizes PCIe Gen 3 x8 to provide 64Gbps bandwidth. With the 12G SAS expander and its Databolt technology, it further provides scalability and manageability by enabling the aggregation of throughput of slower disks. So even the 6G HDD can utilize 12Gb/s bandwidth.
• #17: Let’s now compare with the previous-generation x79U-SAS model. The x79U-SAS uses PCIe Gen2 x8 (40Gbps) which is the culprit of the data transmission bottleneck. As we can see that every SSD can only achieve 500~550MB throughput for a total of 6000MB/s on a 2U model. And with the new x80U-SAS architecture, it can improve the performance by 37%.
• #18: Aside from the high throughput for internal data transmission, the system also boots its high network capability. QNAP partners with Mellanox to provide ConnectX3 Pro Solution, Dual-port 10GbE SFP+ Solution and the industry-first dual-port 40GbE QSFP solution.
• #19: Besides the 1580MU-SAS Hybrid model, 80U-SAS offers 2U 12 bay, 3U 16 bay, 4U 24 bay models. Powered by an Intel E3-1246 V3 3.5GHz CPU with 16 DDR3 RAM (ECC options available) and a 256 SSD cache, the system offers an abundance of expandability options such as a 12Gb SAS interface and an on-board mini-SAS wide port to provide connections for 12Gb SAS JBOD for capacity expansion. The PCIe Gen 3 x 8 slot can accommodate 12Gb HBA for scale-out solutions, dual-port 10Gb or 40Gb network adaptor.
• #20: In this ideal scenario, there are 3 tiers on this JBOD expansion. The top model is the TVS-1580MU-RP while the bottom model would be the REXP-1220U-RP which stores cold data.
• #21: QNAP NAS offers storage solutions based on standardized protocols and infrastructure and compliant to major virtualization software. Therefore, we are able to provide high-performance and the industry’s most comprehensive data storage, backup and disaster recovery.