AFAn

Validating Powering VMware with Optane

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The StorONE S1:All-Flash Array.next (AFAn) initial focus excels in high-performance database environments, but now we are validating powering VMware with Optane. StorageReview recently put an S1:AFA.next through its paces in a VMware environment and came away with impressive results. Join StorONE and StorageReview for a live webinar this Thursday as they discuss how to best use Intel®’s Optane™ in a VMware environment.

How The S1:AFA.next Works

The S1:AFA.next is the world’s first enterprise storage system to blend Intel®’s Optane™ performance as a tier with Intel QLC flash drives’ capacity and cost-effectiveness. The S1:AFAn is built with an Intel-branded server and is powered by StorONE’s Storage Engine software. The combination of Optane and QLC delivers over one million read IOPS and over 300,000 sustained write IOPS. The solution is feature-rich, including capabilities such as protection from multiple media failures thanks to our S1:vRAID. It also includes S1:Snap, our snapshot technology that allows for millions of snapshots, taken every three minutes, that are retainable for years and never impact performance.

Validating Powering VMware with Optane

S1:AFAn leverages StorONE S1:Tier to ensure that the QLC drives provide the best endurance possible, rivaling TLC’s endurance. The first step is for all new and active data to leverage the Optane tier for high write performance and low latency. As data ages, S1:Tier automatically moves data from Intel® Optane™ to QLC in a sequential fashion, which is the preferred pattern for QLC. 

Second, S1:Tier does not automatically promote old data to Optane on access. The read performance of the QLC tier is excellent, and not promoting the data saves unnecessary writes. 

StorONE spent eight years completely rewriting and flattening the storage IO stack, creating a single-layer storage IO engine that can leverage all hardware innovations while establishing a new standard in data integrity and protection. As a result, there is no need for a write cache, which further exploits the high write-performance of Optane. 

Not only does the S1:AFAn perform significantly better than the typical AFA, but it also does so with lower storage server requirements and requiring less physical media. The StorONE enterprise storage platform software’s efficiency means that the price of an AFAn is less than most of our competitors’ AFAs. Its next-generation design, powered by the StorONE S1:Enterprise Platform software, solves the numerous problems common to all other all-flash arrays on the market today.

Evaluation by StorageReview Validates S1:AFAn Design

The StorONE S1:AFAn was recently subjected to a thorough evaluation by Lyle Smith and Kevin O’Brien of the highly respected organization, StorageReview. The evaluation examined all aspects of the S1:AFAn’s design, capabilities, and performance.

One of the first things the evaluators noted was that the S1:AFAn uses Intel Optane as the top tier of storage rather than as a cache while leveraging Intel QLC 3D NAND SSDs for high capacity storage. They also noted that the StorONE Storage Engine software moves data based on high performance while also managing data economics by using the QLC SSDs.

The StorageReview team also noted that, unlike other software-defined platforms with bottlenecks that prevent users from getting the most out of their hardware, StorONE offered users a way to bypass them to get the best performance possible. Additionally, he mentioned that the StorONE GUI is cross-platform compatible, supporting Windows, Linux, Mac, and mobile operating systems.

StorONE Management Software

The StorageReview team next stepped through downloading and installing the StorONE software and then detailed going through the various options for configuring the drives, volumes, and other aspects of managing the system and server resources in the monitoring and provisioning areas. He also noted that he found the software interface fast and easy to navigate. The evaluation provided clear screenshots of the different menus and options.

They then stepped through, creating volumes and selecting various options for them. They pointed out under the disk pool section how you can define different tiers for the built-in auto-tiering functionality, which they stated is one of the essential advantages of the StorONE platform. They also explained how auto-tiering works by analyzing things like read and write patterns and the length of time since data was accessed to decide which data to move to the less expensive QLC tier. This intelligent tiering ensures that infrequently accessed files don’t waste valuable high-performance space.

The team also noted the flexibility and ease in defining policies for unlimited snapshots and how to access the snapshots and search for specific data and then mount them to access their data.

They then described how our vRAID allows administrators to define the amount of data redundancy fragments you need on the system and how it allows you to focus a particular volume more on performance or protection. The team noted that this made the StorONE software a very flexible system that did not have the limitations found in a standard RAID system.

They covered many of the other functions available in the software for monitoring and management and its support for block-based access via iSCSI and Fibre Channel, NAS via SMB and NFS, and its built-in support for Object Store, which supports S3.

The evaluators further noted that overall they were very impressed with the amount of flexibility and customization provided by the StorONE software and its focus on getting the most out of your system.

Evaluating StorONE S1:AFAn VMware Performance

The StorageReview team then detailed all the various performance tests and the workloads they used in these tests. All tests were in a VMware environment. 

The team used the VDBench workload generator to provide a range of different testing profiles. These tests ranged from “four corners” tests, to random read and write tests with different block sizes. They also included standard database transfer size tests, including trace captures from different VDI environments. The review detailed the results for each of these tests and showed graphs detailing the results.

The highlights of these performance tests showed the following results:

  • 4k read of 400K IOPS, 
  • 4k write peak of 32K IOPS
  • 32K read of 226K IOPS, 
  • 32K write of 54K IOPS
  • Sequential 64K read of 2.8GB/s
  • 64K write of 2GB/s. 

For SQL workloads, they reported peaks of 

  • 287K IOPS, 242K IOPS for SQL 90-10, 
  • 195K IOPS for SQL 80-20. 

For Oracle workloads, they reported peaks of

  • 180K IOPS, 243K IOPS in Oracle 90-10
  • 190K IOPS in Oracle 80-20. 

The team also ran VDI FC tests reporting: 

  • 180K IOPS for boot, 
  • 67K IOPS for Initial Login
  • 74K IOPS for Monday Login. 

StorageReview Conclusions

The StorageReview team noted that while the S1:AFAn takes full advantage of some of the best storage technologies available from Intel, the real key or “secret sauce” is in the StorONE S1:Enterprise Platform software. They commented that S1 helps to create an environment where users can take full advantage of Optane and QLC storage. They also noted that the software is easy-to-use and built around eliminating bottlenecks and maximizing the potential performance. 

The StorageReview team further stated that the StorONE S1:AFAn demonstrates a cost-effective way to leverage QLC NAND in an enterprise setting with Intel Optane SSDs as the top tier of storage. 

Conclusion

The StorageReview testing and evaluation clearly show that the StorONE S1:AFA•next design and its software are exceptionally flexible and fully able to support any technology a data center may use for storage and networking now and into the future. It also proves the VMware environments can benefit greatly from adopting this technology.

The Case for Hard Drive Storage

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Even in production, the case for hard drive storage is a strong one, but several vendors are trying to make a case against its use. Even reputable analysts state that the days of hard disk drives (HDD) are numbered. IT professionals should consider these sources carefully with a high degree of skepticism.

There is a case for hard drive storage in secondary storage applications and primary storage. Indeed, in the face of flash media, HDDs have a different role to play than they did 15 years ago. Still, a change in their role does not mean that HDD storage is in any way obsolete or that IT professionals are doing their organization a disservice by leveraging HDDs. Quite the opposite, IT architects who can properly architect hard disk into primary and secondary storage give their organization a competitive advantage.

Case for Hard Drive Storage

The Price Advantage of HDD Storage

Although recently its reached a fever pitch, for almost ten years now, there have been claims that flash storage systems were within a year of reaching price parity with hard disk storage. Even with QLC, All-Flash Arrays are not much closer to price parity now than they were ten years ago. Flash-only vendors continue to make the purposeful mistake of assuming that hard disk technology will stand still and that current hard disk manufacturers will allow their products to stagnate. The opposite is happening. HDD vendors continue to invest in the technology, and HDDs remain the best per GB value in the data center for both primary and secondary storage.

The TRUE Price of a Hard Disk System

Right now, our TRUprice on a hybrid storage array is $199,000. It includes 1.2PB of hard disk capacity and 107TB of flash capacity. It also includes our StorONE Storage Engine, including vRAID, vSnap, and vReplicate. Our industry-leading price on TRUprice on a 1PB all-flash array is $499,000 with the same software and capabilities. That is $300,000 more for less capacity. And, because of StorONE’s Intelligent Hybrid Technology, many data centers will not notice a performance difference between the two. If you want an All-Flash Array, we have a solution; if you want a Hybrid Storage Array, we have a solution. We think the choice should be yours.

Besides noticing the price difference, notice that StorONE provides HDD and All-Flash systems (and Optane). How would the other vendors claiming the end of the HDD even know? They don’t sell HDDs!

The Hybrid Advantage of an HDD

Hybrid Storage automatically moves data from a fast tier to a slower tier. We use this technology in our AFA•next, which transparently moves older data from Optane to QLC. Optane acts as a shock absorber to the more delicate QLC tier. The same software powers our more traditional Hybrid Storage systems. Data is written to a TLC flash tier and then moves transparently to the HDD tier. Writes from the upper tier to the lower tier are sequential, setting the next tier up for excellent read performance.

The question that plagues legacy hybrid storage systems is, “what will performance look like if we access data, not on the flash tier?” It is a fair question. Obviously, in the Optane to QLC scenario, there is almost no noticeable performance difference. However, in hard disk storage, a legacy Hybrid Storage system doesn’t help mitigate the performance delta. They use too small of a hybrid tier, and they do very little to improve the hard disk tier’s performance.

StorONE’s Advanced Hybrid technology resolves these issues. First, StorONE’s Hybrid Storage uses a relatively large flash tier because of our price advantage. In the example above, the flash tier is 107TBs, and the flash capacity is expandable to Petabytes if need be.

Second, we improve the performance of hard disk drives. For most customers, the chances that operational data is not on the 107TBs of flash is minimal, but it can happen, and our engine is ready for it. StorONE spent its first seven years rewriting and flattening the storage stack. Our storage engine reads and writes data more quickly than any other system on the market. On our AFA•next, this means over one million IOPS from just four Optane drives. Our all-flash systems will deliver over one-million IOPS from only 12 NVMe flash drives.

Hard drives are not left out, however. Again, we own all the storage IO elements in our solution. In our Q4-2021 release, we improved hard disk performance by 5X! This performance improvement means that on the rare occasion when an application or user needs data from the HDD tier, it is delivered to them very quickly. The HDD tier is not very busy because of that large flash tier. In most cases, accessing data on the HDD tier, which may be months, if not years old, is not the priority, as is accessing data that is only minutes old. However, most users and applications won’t notice a performance difference because of these advanced storage management factors.

case for hard drive storage

StorONE’s Intelligent Hybrid Technology is also intelligent in how the recall occurs. If the platform senses mostly small block, transactional IO, it promotes the data to the flash tier as the application accesses it. However, if the accesses are large block, sequential, we deliver the data directly to the application. Once you get 20+ hard drives spinning, they can provide the bandwidth these applications need.

Maybe vendors that don’t provide at least an option for hard disk drives do so because they simply can’t figure out the intricate development work required to deliver automatic tiering. Worse, maybe the vendors use flash-only to hide a severe weakness in their code that hard disk technology will expose, like RAID rebuild performance.

The RAID Rebuild Advantage of HDD

Do hard disk drives have a RAID rebuild advantage? Yes, as most customers who need hard disk drives need many of them. If the RAID technology knows how to leverage this reality, then HDDs have an advantage. After a drive failure, the time to return to a protected state is likely the biggest concern of using hard drives. With 16TB and 18TB drives becoming commonplace, rebuild time will only worsen. If they support hard drives, legacy storage systems can take days or even weeks to bring a hard disk-based volume back to a protected state because of their outdated and inefficient software.

StorONE’s vRAID, however, can bring a volume residing on 16TB hard drives back to a protected state in less than two hours, not two days. As density increases on flash, we also see similar concerns about rebuild times with that media. We’ve heard multiple reports of double-digit hour rebuilds with 8TB flash drives. As 15 and 30TB flash drives enter the market, IT can expect multi-day rebuild times from flash. But, StorONE can rebuild flash volumes with 15.3TB flash drives in less than four minutes.

The Software is Key to Experiencing the Advantage of HDD

RAID rebuild times are not a uniquely Flash or HDD problem. They are a software problem. The storage software is the key to getting the full value from the media. That software should be written in a way that gives you a choice to leverage whatever technology enables you to meet both the budget and performance demands of your organization. The storage software should bring out the best from whatever media you choose and do its best to protect you from its weaknesses.

It is Your Data Center

All storage solutions have software as a critical component. If a vendor is forcing you to choose one media over another, it may be because using their software with another type of media exposes their code’s weakness. Even if you want an All-Flash Array (AFA), it makes sense to at least have the option to leverage another form of media in the future. It may be adding a hard disk drive tier for capacity, or it may even be adding an Optane tier for even more performance.

Remember, the choice of which media makes the most sense for your organization is yours, not your storage vendor.

Make Storage Ready for 2021

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The State of StorONE: An update from our CEO, Gal Naor

StorONE makes storage ready for 2021 and beyond. This past year was one like no other. With a collective sigh of relief and hope for a better tomorrow, we recognize the good that came from 2020. Thanks to our advanced planning and fortitude, 2020 was StorONE’s best year yet.

The storage hardware advancements that defined the past decade will continue, and 2021 promises more innovation than we ever thought possible. StorONE takes full advantage of these innovations to solve any storage challenge. Our Storage Engine simplifies the entire storage infrastructure, delivers unrivaled data protection, and eliminates data migration, all while significantly lowering storage TCO.

Here are some examples of what we did in 2020 to revolutionize the storage industry:

People: In 2020, just a bit before COVID took over our lives, we began hiring a marketing team. George Crump, StorONE’s CMO, and his entire team have transformed the company. Then, in the middle of the pandemic, StorONE made an unprecedented move to invest in ourselves instead of cutting back. We hired Chris Bowen as VP of Sales in Q3 and sales professionals from around the world during Q3 and Q4. Not only did our sales increase dramatically, but Q4 was, in short, a game-changer for the company.

Better storage

Technology: During Q4, we deployed a vital feature: auto-tiering. We believe that auto-tiering represents the future of storage. Tiering saves money without impacting performance. For example, our All-Flash Array.next has a tier of Intel Optane and a tier of quad-level cell (QLC) flash. The upper tier of Optane can sustain over 1 million read IOPS, and 300K sustained write IOPS (most all-flash vendors never report a write IOPS result). You can access our Intel Optane powered AFAn performance report here.

Our tiering is transparent to both the administrators and users. Our system automatically configures tiering intervals. Most importantly, our tiering is seamless and has virtually no impact on latency, even during the worst conditions.

StorONE offers two auto-tiering configurations:

1. SSD (upper) and HDD (lower) deliver significant cost savings versus all-flash arrays.

2. Optane (upper) and QLC (lower) – deliver affordable Optane performance without feature compromise.

VARs: We refer to resellers of our products as Partners. We are as interested in their success as we are in ours. During Q4, we launched PartnerONE, StorONE’s program for our partners to simplify their sales strategies. We built our innovative program to provide them with the tools needed to overcome any customer storage infrastructure challenge and showcase StorONE’s competitive advantage. As StorONE’s products are hardware agnostic, PartnerONE members can use hardware from the server vendors of their choice. They also have exclusive access to S1:Cloud “as a service” pricing model and can eliminate the cloud as competition.

I am confident that the storage industry will benefit from an increase in strategic partnerships between vendors, resellers, hardware manufacturers, and distributors.

Transparency: Simply put, transparency is in our DNA. A lack of transparent pricing and performance results plagues the storage industry. Vendors have created a shell game, where the customer never knows if they are getting the best price or how their system performs versus the rest of the industry. In 2020, StorONE decided that this situation had to end. Users demand honesty. The sector deserves transparency.

In 2020 we launched our message of transparency in two realms – pricing and performance. In Q2 of 2020, we announced our revolutionary TRUprice site. TRUprice is the first and only storage configuration tool that provides accurate pricing for any storage solution, using any hardware without requiring the individual to sign up and leave details. Since May, TRUprice has become the number one destination for IT professionals and analysts to get storage pricing. Many articles have been written lauding our site as the place to go.

Transparent pricing

In 2020 Q4, we continued our push for transparency by publishing the Evaluator Group’s independent testing of StorONE’s Intel Optane powered, All-Flash Array.next (AFAn). The report details the consulting firm’s extensive testing of StorONE’s AFAn solution and validates its claim as a $-per-IOPS leader. The test system delivered over 1 million non-cached IOPS, and it is available on our TRUprice website for less than $50,000!

Having one company test our performance wasn’t enough. We decided to have Storage Review independently test our AFAn as well, and they concur with Evaluator Group and brilliantly explain how our company revolutionizes the storage industry:

“The StorONE All-Flash array takes advantage of some of the best storage technologies out there from Intel, but the secret sauce is in the software. The company’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform software helps to create a software-defined environment where users can take full advantage of Optane and QLC storage. The easy-to-use software is built around the elimination of bottlenecks and maximizing the potential performance. StorONE puts a large emphasis on flexibility with capacity-based licensing fees that have pricing reflective of the customer’s system size or they can examine your needs and recommended a system based on them”.

StorONE makes storage ready

We accomplished our goals! By having independent testing done for our products, we can confidently assure our customers that they are indeed receiving the best storage solution. At the same time, I continue to call on my colleagues in the industry to publish their results, too. There are few things needed more now than transparency.

COVID-19: I debated writing about COVID again, but I would be remiss to ignore the pandemic as it continues to ravage the world. I hope the end is near. I hope the vaccine will soon become available to everyone. In the meantime, please continue to keep your guard up. I believe that the pre-COVID and post-COVID worlds won’t be as dissimilar as some claim, but we need to get there first. Let’s work together for a better tomorrow.

Thank you: To my amazing team, thank you! Thank you for working so hard during a most challenging year. Whether you were dealing with health struggles, kids being home from school, or the colossal stress of the world combusting around us, as a company, we managed to juggle all the balls at once. Your perseverance and dedication make StorONE the kind of company the industry and customers need. At StorONE, we say, “Think Results.” The results of 2020 are clear: we took the storage industry by storm and have paved the way to lead the storage industry by example: delivering BETTER storage, TRANSPARENT pricing and performance, and the BEST results.

If you would like to hear more about the company and our plans for 2021, please contact me to set up a call.

Better Hybrid Storage for VMware

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Instead of forcing customers to move to all-flash arrays (AFA), vendors need to provide better hybrid storage for VMware. The challenge that any virtual environment presents to a storage system is the workload variability of the virtual machine (VM) population.

VMware has proven itself to be a reliable way to get the maximum value out of physical servers. As a result, organizations are now virtualizing bare-metal workloads that are mission-critical. As IT increases the number of these VMs, the performance demands on the storage system increase significantly. This problem is generally solved by deploying an all-flash array.

The reality is, however, that the VMware environment doesn’t just support these performance demanding VMs. It also supports workloads with more mid-range performance needs and other workloads that are more capacity-based than IO-based. Even the performance demanding VMs don’t need all their data on high-performance storage at all times.

Hybrid Storage for VMware

In other words, the workload variety of VMs justifies a hybrid system more so than an all-flash array. Why then are AFAs so popular? The AFA vendors claim that IT can’t risk using a hybrid storage solution because the performance delta between a flash drive and a hard disk drive is so significant that users will notice the drop in performance.

They are right, there is a significant performance difference, and that’s why our flash-HDD hybrids are configured with more flash capacity than any of our competitors.

A Better Hybrid Solution

However, a better hybrid solution is our All-Flash Array.next (AFAn), which uses Intel Optane as the upper tier and Intel Quad Level Cells (QLC) Flash as the lower tier. It not only provides a better hybrid experience than traditional hard disk/flash hybrid storage, but it also offers better performance than every all-flash array on the market. Additionally, it delivers that performance at a lower price than those all-flash arrays. You can download our performance report here, and you can price your AFAn on TRUprice.

AFAn Better for VMware

The AFAn is ideal for the mixed workload, storage IO blender typical of VMware environments. All writes go to the Optane tier, which delivers high IOPS and sub-half-second latency. The system also reads the most active data from that tier. AFAn uses Optane as storage, not as a cache, which means we have drive redundancy to protect from drive failure. To learn more about caching and tiering, check out Chris Evans’ blog “Caching vs. Tiering.“

Hybrid Storage for VMware

Powered by Optane, those newly virtualized mission-critical workloads now get the extreme performance of Optane. This means the AFAn handily outperforms more expensive AFAs. For customers, this means they can virtualize more mission-critical workloads on fewer physical servers, driving down the total ROI of their VMware environment.

The advantage of using Optane as a storage tier provides time. Data can become less ephemeral and be moved to the QLC flash tier sequentially. QLC flash is less durable than Triple Level Cells (TLC) flash but is also less expensive. Sequentially writing to QLC increases its durability by 10X. The other advantage of sequentially writing to QLC is it improves the already excellent read IO. As a result, applications and users will notice no performance impact when accessing older data. In other words, AFAn solves the Hybrid performance problem.

Being powered by QLC, means that the AFAn is ideal for supporting all VM workloads. Less performance-critical VMs’ data will tier down to QLC but still enjoy a sequentially written QLC tier’s excellent access performance. With 15.8TB QLC drives commonplace and 30TB QLC drives less than six months away, AFAn customers will be able to meet all their capacity requirements using almost no rack space.

The AFAn comes with all the capabilities of the StorONE Enterprise Storage Platform. The AFAn’s vRAID delivers RAID rebuild times of less than one minute, can execute and manage millions of snapshots, and can replicate synchronously and asynchronously to dissimilar hardware. Just because you have an Optane powered AFAn in production doesn’t mean you also have to have one at the DR site.

Most importantly, an AFAn supports more than VMware. Being powered by the Enterprise Storage Platform, means that the AFAn supports block protocols like fiber channel, iSCSI, NVMe-oF and file protocols like NFS, SMB and S3/Object. After using AFAn to address all their VMware challenges, customers can extend the solution to manage bare-metal workloads like Oracle and MS-SQL as well as traditional NAS workloads. They can even address next-generation needs like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics.

To learn more about using AFAn on VMware, watch our on-demand webinar “How to Make Hybrid Storage Cool for VMware.“

Databases Require More Than All-Flash

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All-Flash Array (AFA) vendors position their hardware as the cure-all for database storage but administrators know that databases require more than all-flash. The most important requirement of any database storage system is that it must maintain data integrity, an area where most all-flash arrays fail miserably. Another database requirement is to protect data from eventual failures of media and storage hardware. Most AFAs fair better in this area but make you compromise on performance or flexibility. A final requirement is to help database teams better manage storage. Database environments are notorious for requiring multiple copies of databases for test/dev, QA and reporting. Most AFAs simply can’t help in this area, so customers are forced to buy additional storage and even additional software to help them manage the copies.

Databases Require More Data Integrity than All-Flash Provides

Most AFAs use RAM as a cache for both reads and writes. Most database architects design their database servers with massive amounts of internal RAM for read caching. Caching reads again on the AFA provides no additional value and a double cache adds to latency. Most AFAs also provide a write cache on the system, since one of the weaknesses of flash is its poor write performance. While this may provide some performance benefit, the technique does put data at risk because write acknowledgment occurs before the data is on media. If there is a failure while data is in a transient state, there will be data loss. A loss that may be unidentifiable since the database itself is working under the assumption that the write completed successfully.

StorONE’s All-Flash Array.next (AFAn) provides high performance without the need of a RAM cache for either reads or writes. All write IO is sent, and confirmed, to its Intel Optane tier prior to acknowledging write completion to the database. Because the AFAn uses Optane as storage and not as a cache, the media is protected from drive failure so storing data on this tier until it becomes less ephemeral is perfectly safe. Read “Caching vs Tiering” to learn more about the differences between the two technologies.

Databases require more than snapshots
StorONE AFAn provides high performance

Databases Require Better RAID

Modern databases are too critical to be dependent on outdated RAID algorithms. Database architects require better protection from failure than the one or two drive redundancy that RAID5 and RAID6 provide. At the same time they don’t want to go to the extreme of a full mirror. The answer to the RAID dilemma can be found in erasure coding. It provides full flexibility in drive redundancy levels, supports mixed drive sizes within the same group and does not require dedicated hot spares. It also provides much more rapid, parallel rebuilds than RAID. The problem with erasure coding is its typical performance is not acceptable for production workloads.

StorONE’s AFAn uses vRAID, an advance form of erasure coding, to deliver all the capabilities of erasure coding with no impact on performance. In our database testing benchmarks, vRAID is active in all tests, yet the AFAn still achieved over one million IOPS.

Databases Require Better than Snapshots

Most AFAs have snapshots, which should enable database architects to address the needs of multiple copies of their databases. They should be able to take a snapshot and feed that to test/dev, QA, reporting, and backup processes. The reality is most AFAs can only maintain a small number of snapshots per system. A database environment can easily require hundreds of snapshots of the database at different intervals with indefinite retention needs. A typical AFA would suffer serious performance impacts if asked to replace stand-alone database copies with snapshot copies.

StorONE’s AFAn can literally deliver an unlimited number of snapshots and retain those snapshots indefinitely, without impacting performance. StorONE’s S1:Snap technology enables database architects to take snapshots as frequently as every three minutes, and retain those snapshots for years. The snapshot versions of databases can be restored as read/write volumes and then used by any of the various processes listed above.

Databases Require Better Performance

Modern databases, in relation to the storage system, contain a much higher percentage of write IO than they did a few years ago. Today, IT purchases large quantities of RAM and places it inside the database servers so that the majority of the read IO is serviced from the server’s RAM. The use of large amounts of RAM means that the majority of the server IO going to the storage infrastructure is write IO, not read IO. The storage infrastructure needs to support very high write IO performance, a weak spot for traditional AFAs.

Databases require more than caching
The use of large amounts of RAM means that the majority of the server IO going to the storage infrastructure is write IO, not read IO.

The use of large amounts of RAM to overcome poor network performance is IT’s attempt to address another storage challenge, the inefficient read performance of all-flash arrays and their poor utilization of network bandwidth. Using large amounts of RAM is an effective workaround but it is also expensive.

The AFAn’s use of Intel Optane as a storage tier is ideal for RAM-heavy database servers. Optane provides a significant write performance advantage over flash so it can respond quickly to inbound write commands. The AFAn can deliver over 300k sustained write IOPS from its Optane tier while maintaining sub-millisecond latency.

Databases Require a Better Storage ROI

Data Integrity is critical and so is performance but as some point the storage system needs to justify its investment. AFAs do very little to reduce the cost of database storage infrastructure; in most cases they increase it. To deliver anywhere close to acceptable performance the AFA requires dozens of flash drives. The problem is most databases don’t need the capacity that these dozens of drives deliver. The database architects find themselves dealing with the same problems they used to deal with during the days of hard drives.

The key to a better database storage ROI is to extract the full potential of the media the storage system uses. Maximizing potential becomes even more important when using Intel Optane technology. The AFAn is able to deliver over 1 million read IOPS and 300K write IOPS from just four Optane drives. The AFAn further improves ROI by intelligently using QLC for less ephemeral data and older snapshots to further drive down the cost of capacity. The QLC tier however provides excellent read performance and as a result delivers automated tiering without performance impact.

With AFAn you get the best database storage ROI in the industry while improving data integrity and data protection.

Next Steps

To learn more about what is next in Database Storage, join our live webinar tomorrow at 1:00pm ET / 10:00am PT:

To learn more about how StorONE can revolutionize your database storage infrastructure check out our StorONE for Databases page

You can also register to get a copy of our AFAn performance report:

Consolidating Storage with Optane

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Consolidating storage with Optane enables organizations to solve the single biggest challenge to a storage centralization project: workload diversity. Workload diversity creates a wide storage performance spectrum that most consolidation solutions can’t cover. Intel’s Optane Storage Class Memory solves that problem.

It provides better performance than flash and better endurance. Storage systems that integrate Intel Optane, using it as storage instead of cache, can deliver the high-performance end of the performance spectrum created by workloads like databases, commercial HPC, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives. In this entry we resolve the issues we describe in our last entry “Storage Consolidation is Broken.”

Consolidating Storage with Optane solves the Performance Spectrum problem
The Performance Spectrum

Understanding the Performance Spectrum 

The high-end of the performance spectrum is drive by $ per IOPS. However, a consolidated storage solution must also address the low-end of the performance spectrum, where $ per GB is more critical. Workloads like backup, archive, and files can still benefit from the fast access of solid-state, but the storage system must balance that benefit with a sensible price per GB. 

Why All-Optane and All-Flash Can’t Consolidate

While an All-Optane solution can meet the extreme performance requirements of the upper end of the performance spectrum, it’s too expensive for its middle and lower sections of the performance spectrum because it costs too much. An All-Optane solution forces customers to buy an additional two or three other systems to meet all the requirements of all workloads.  An All-Flash-Array (AFA) based on TLC flash can’t reach the extreme performance requirements of the upper end of the spectrum, and is also too expensive for the lower end of the spectrum. 

Consolidating Storage with Optane Requires QLC

Consolidating storage with Optane requires the storage system to integrate with another more capacity-centric technology. QLC flash memory is the most logical companion. Intel Optane can act as a shock-absorbing storage tier, enabling the software to write to QLC sequentially, which extends durability. QLC drives also have the read performance to keep pace with Intel Optane. Most importantly, QLC technology is priced less than traditional TLC flash so organizations can afford to store petabytes of data on the tier. 

Consolidating Storage with Optane Requires Tiering

The concept of moving data between tiers of storage based on age is not new and was very popular when flash first came to market. The practice of pairing flash storage with hard disk drives was commonplace, and many customers still use these systems today. AFA vendors claim that tiering was risky and unpredictable. They stated that an AFA with deduplication was a far safer choice. In fairness, there is a certain unpredictability to the performance of a flash/hard disk system. The access times are significantly different.  

The answer is consolidating storage with Optane and then adding QLC to address these concerns entirely. It is critical to use Optane as storage and not as cache or the system doesn’t benefit from the primary advantages of Optane. Using Optane as flash delivers many advantage. First, reading data from the QLC tier offers no measurable performance impact to the user. Second, because the response to data access is direct from the QLC tier, there is no background overhead of rapidly promoting old data to the upper tier. Third, since access from the lower tier is at the same rate as the upper tier, the tiering process can trigger an access date instead of a modification date, making the upper-tier far more efficient. Fourth, the low-cost of QLC eliminates the need for deduplication and all its associated penalties, as we describe in our white paper “Exposing the Hidden Costs of Deduplication.”

Consolidating Storage with Optane Reduces Data Center Costs

Consolidating Storage with Optane Lowers total data center costs
Lower Overall Data Center Costs with Consolidation

Consolidating storage with Optane not only reduces storage costs; it has a ripple effect that reduces costs throughout the data center. From a storage perspective, a storage system that integrates Intel Optane with QLC can provide complete storage consolidation because it can cover the entire performance spectrum. The integration of Optane and QLC creates a single storage solution for the enterprise, which lowers operational overhead and improves storage efficiencies. Consolidating storage with Optane also enables organizations to drive their compute tier harder. Virtual environments are denser, and databases can scale further per database server. Also, the high write performance of Optane enables organizations to cut their database server RAM spend by 50% or more. Consolidating with Optane lowers the number of servers required for computing, and it reduces the cost of those servers. It also lowers software licensing costs. 

Consolidating Storage with Optane Requires AFAn

StorONE’s All-Flash Array.next (AFAn) is an Optane-based flash array that integrates Optane with QLC to meet all the requirements of the performance spectrum. It provides very high performance and incredibly low latency at the lowest $ per IOPS in the industry. Its use of QLC enables organizations also to use AFAn for file data, archive data, and yes, even backup data. StorONE’s unique snapshot technology allows the AFAn to execute snapshots every three minutes and retain those snapshots indefinitely, eliminating the need for daily and weekly backups. 

With AFAn, you can eliminate today’s storage pain point while growing into, at your pace, a storage consolidation strategy. For example, use AFAn to remove three database storage issues (data integrity, performance, and price), and in the future, expand the solution to adopt other workloads like VMware. To learn more about how AFAn can solve your database challenges check our StorONE for Database guide.

Consolidating with AFAn Eliminates Storage Migrations

The StorONE AFAn design can last for ten years or more, without the need for storage migrations. The Intel server on which our software turns into a storage controller is potent. We can support 15 to 30 petabytes of capacity and as well as extract the full performance of the next generation of Intel Optane without the need to swap out the server. When the time does come to move to the next generation of servers, you can perform the upgrade non-disruptively without a need to migrate data. Implementing an AFAn means not worrying about storage for the next decade while you simplify storage operations dramatically. 

Next Steps

Our All-Flash Array.next product page has all the details on our Optane solution. 

See it in action. Schedule a demo of the AFAn and see the capabilities of the solution for yourself: Contact Us

Price and Configure the solution yourself with our transparent pricing, TRUprice

Watch our on-demand webinar with Intel to learn more about consolidating storage with Optane

Download Program Overview

Learn More About the Hidden Cost of Dedupe

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