HP SmartCache technology

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Technical white paper

Table of contents

Abstract .................................................................................................................................................................................. 2

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................ 2

Comparing storage technology performance ............................................................................................................... 3

What about hybrid drives? ............................................................................................................................................... 3

Why caching? ......................................................................................................................................................................... 4

How does caching work? ...................................................................................................................................................... 4

HP SmartCache architecture ................................................................................................................................................ 4

HP SmartCache for Direct-Attached Storage ................................................................................................................ 5

HP SmartCache for SAN Storage ..................................................................................................................................... 6

Management and analytics .................................................................................................................................................. 6

Case study: OLTP workload ................................................................................................................................................. 6

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................................... 11

Resources, contacts, or additional links .......................................................................................................................... 12

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Summary of content (12 pages)

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Technical white paper HP SmartCache technology Table of contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................................................2 Introduction............................................................................................................................................................................2 Comparing storage technology performance ..............................
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Technical white paper | HP SmartCache Abstract As an IT professional, you are seeking cost effective ways to increase the performance of applications. With CPU core counts growing and addressable memory space increasing, storage can become the main bottleneck for virtualized and dataintensive environments.
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Technical white paper | Product, solution, or service Comparing storage technology performance SSDs provide significant performance advantages over traditional HDDs. Figure 2 illustrates the relative performance in Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and latency for a performance HDD, a mainstream SSD, and an IO Accelerator. The HP IO Accelerator is an interface card containing an SSD, flash memory, and a custom controller that significantly improves data throughput with external storage devices.
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Technical white paper | HP SmartCache Why caching? So you may ask, if SSDs are superior in performance, why not use HP IO Accelerators and SSDs in all server configurations? The answer is that you need to weigh requirements for capacity and performance against the increased costs for those abilities. As the cost of SSDs is trending downward, SSD technology is making inroads into the enterprise server market to address the low latency requirements for certain applications.
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Technical white paper | Product, solution, or service HP SmartCache for Direct-Attached Storage The direct-attached HP SmartCache solution includes the three elements of the HP SmartCache architecture; HDDs serving as bulk storage, SSDs as the accelerator, and Flash-Backed Write Cache (FBWC 1) memory for storing the metadata (Figure 3).
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Technical white paper | HP SmartCache HP SmartCache for SAN Storage Future HP SmartCache solutions will support external storage configurations, including SAN storage products such as the HP 3PAR StoreServe solutions. HP SmartCache will also support additional accelerators like the HP IO Accelerator. For SAN implementation, the HP SmartCache control layer moves into the host memory with the operating system above the device drivers and beneath the file system.
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Technical white paper | Product, solution, or service The Smart Array P421 controller disk configuration included the following: • Boot Volume: 2 - 72GB 10K 6G SAS drives configured in RAID 1 • Database Logs: 4 - 300GB 10K 6G SAS drives configured in RAID 5 • Database: 12 - 300GB (10K 6G SAS drives configured in RAID 1+0 • HP SmartCache: 1 – 100GB SSD MLC 6G SSD drive configured in RAID 0.
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Technical white paper | HP SmartCache % writes 11 12 Average IOPS, Read 4,382 19,464 (over 4x better) Average IOPS, Write 550 2,650 (almost 5x better) Duration (seconds) 6644 7201 I/O distribution (reads) Count Avg. latency (msec) Count Avg. latency (msec) 0% @ 4K 0 0.00 0 0.00 97.6% @ 8K 28,430,311 27.97 140,159,417 6.23 0% @ 16k 71 28.21 0 0.00 <1% @ 32K 1,457 21.54 0 0.00 2.3% @ 64K 682,201 18.79 0 0.00 0% @ 128K 0 0.00 0 0.00 0% @ 256K 0 0.00 0 0.
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Technical white paper | Product, solution, or service HP SmartCache, the disk subsystem was able to process approximately four times as many requests than without HP SmartCache. Number of I/Os Figure 6. Transaction volume through database volume. Figure 7. HP SmartCache provides increased IOPS. 25K Average number of IOPS Looking at the data another way, we see the differences in the number of input/output transactions performed per second (IOPS) with and without HP SmartCache (Figure 7).
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Technical white paper | HP SmartCache Once data is saved in the FBWC, the Smart Array controller ensures that the data is written to the hard disk drives. The primary function of the FBWC is to protect the data in the FBWC in case of unplanned power loss to the server. From an application workload perspective, the write load of the application o the Smart Array controller is not high enough nor sustained long enough to fill the capacity of the FBWC so the write IO response time is excellent. Figure 8.
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Technical white paper | Product, solution, or service Amount of writes Figure 10. 8K Write Latency Distribution Milliseconds 8K write, no cache 8K write, SmartCache Conclusion While other applications such as databases, analytics, and virtual desktops can benefit from acceleration techniques, TPCelike workloads present the biggest challenge, and HP SmartCache succeeds.
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Resources, contacts, or additional links HP SmartCache http://www.hp.com/go/smartcache HP Dynamic Workload Acceleration http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA3-9649ENW.pdf HP PCIe IO Accelerator for ProLiant servers http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/solid-state/benefits.html?jumpid=reg_r1002_usen_c001_title_r0007 Sign up for updates hp.com/go/getupdated Share with colleagues Rate this document © Copyright 2013 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.