HOUSE OF CARDS IAAS WITHOUT STORAGE PERFORMANCE TESTING - HOWARD MARKS, DEEP STORAGE LEN ROSENTHAL, LOAD DYNAMIX

House of Cards
 IaaS without storage
 performance testing

Howard Marks, Deep Storage
Len Rosenthal, Load DynamiX

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Your NOT So Humble Speaker

 25+ years of consulting and
  writing for trade press
 Columnist/blogger at
  NetworkComputing.com
 Chief Scientist DeepStorage, LLC
 Independent test lab and analysts
 @DeepStorageNet on Twitter
 Hmarks@DeepStorage.Net

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Today’s Agenda

 What do we mean by IaaS?
 Why IaaS is for the corporate
  datacenter?
 The three types of IaaS storage
 How IaaS makes life difficult for
  storage
  ▸ The I/O blender and other hypervisor
    effects
  ▸ Users choose their storage level
  ▸ Noisy neighbors have a lease
 Which makes storage testing all the
  more critical

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Infrastructure As A Service?

 Self service meets virtualization
 Users create VM from service
 catalog through web interface
 ▸ CPU, memory, storage capacity,
   storage class
 Can be delivered several ways
 ▸ Public (eg: AWS, Microsoft Azure)
 ▸ Private (eg: VMware vCAC,
   Openstack, Cloudstack)
 Still in your data center for
 security and privacy

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IaaS Drivers

 Agility
  ▸ Workload deployment shrinks
   from days to minutes
  ▸ Workloads billed by the hour
   •   Ideal for seasonal, temporary
       workloads
   •   Encourages users to release
       unneeded resources
   •   Can lead to higher utilization

 Allows IT to compete with
  public cloud

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Storage = IaaS Magic

 Scaling the compute side of IaaS
  is science
  ▸ Just manage the vCPU to core ratio
 Storage for IaaS is still an art form
  ▸ Storage costs vary over 10X for same
   capacity
   •   Therefore, a large fraction of total costs
 ▸ Storage guy metrics like IOPS alien to
   users
 ▸ Poor visibility into how applications
   affect storage
 ▸ Many projects stall on storage
   performance

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IaaS Storage Types

 Non-persistent
 ▸ Block storage that’s released when VM
   shutdown
 Persistent block storage
 ▸ Eg: Amazon EBS, Openstack Cinder
 ▸ Dynamically provisioned, traditional
   storage
 Object Storage
 ▸ The cheap stuff eg: Amazon S3
 ▸ Requires application support or gateway

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Block Storage in Classes

 Defined in orchestration layer
 ▸ Media
   •   SSD, hybrid, spinning disk, Etc.
 ▸ Data protection
   •   RAID level, replication, snapshot
       schedule
 ▸ Hopefully storage QoS
   •   Minimum IOPS, IOPS quota
   •   Priority
 Some limited to gold, silver,
 bronze

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The Cloud’s Dark Side

 Cloud providers have no visibility
 ▸ Into how storage will be used
 ▸ Into the application
   •   So APM tools limited value
 ▸ Into future requirements
 The user/customer buys 200GB
 of Silver
 ▸ That may be a WORN archive or real
   time trading database
 ▸ They may make it 2TB overnight
 ▸ They may have needed bronze or
   plutonium

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Virtualization is Hard on Storage

 Disk drives like sequential
 workloads
 When multiple VMs do sequential
 I/O they’re multiplexed together
 That throws I/O into a blender…
 all I/O is now random I/O!
 5 VMs each needing 100 IOPS
 might need 700-1000 IOPS when
 virtualized

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Enter the Noisy Neighbor

 Pre virtualization storage
 performance managed by
 spindles
 ▸ More IOPS, more 15K RPM drives
 ▸ Each app had dedicated spindles
 In IaaS multiple VMs, from
 different users, share a volume
 When marketing re-indexes
 their database at 2PM others
 may suffer

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Can’t I Just Throw Flash At It?

 Flash based SSDs do provide
 lots of IOPS
 ▸ But even all flash arrays have their
   limits
   •   and most of us can’t afford them
 Hybrid solutions are application
  sensitive
  ▸ How much flash? How to deploy?
 Storage performance validation
  with load testing can reveal:
  ▸ How much flash you need
  ▸ How your system will react to new
   workloads, noisy neighbors
 ▸ Performance limits

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Storage Performance Validation
A key to successful IaaS

Len Rosenthal
VP, Marketing

                                 July 24, 2014

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Who is Load DynamiX?

 Who we are    Leader in Storage Performance Validation
               Putting your storage technologies to the test

     Mission   Provide insight into storage infrastructure
               behavior to assure performance & optimize
               cost for public and private clouds

     History   Market entry March 2009; Privately-held

Headquarters   Santa Clara, CA

   Products       Software: Load DynamiX Enterprise
                  Hardware: LDX Series load generation
                   appliances

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Storage Performance Validation
Go Daddy Case Study

Go Daddy Overview
   World’s largest web hosting provider: 5+ million accounts
   Over 50 million domain names under management               “Load DynamiX
   3300 employees; 600+ IT developers, 5 storage admins        is like my smart
                                                                phone – I can’t
IT Challenge
                                                                imagine my life
   Determine most cost-effective storage systems to support    without it!”
    31PB growing 30% annually with 99.999% uptime across 5
    data centers                                                Julia Palmer
                                                                Manager,
Solution                                                        Performance
   Multiple Load DynamiX 10G Series appliances                 Engineering

Go Daddy Benefits                                               Go Daddy
   Projected storage cost savings of 65% over 2 years
   Full confidence that their storage systems can support
    projected workloads
   Freedom to rapidly innovate with new technologies
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Attaining IaaS Enlightenment

                                                       Validate with
                                      Validate with
                                     freeware tools
                      Test in        (Iometer, etc.)
                    production
                     and pray
If it ain’t broke
   don’t fix it!

              Evolution of Storage Performance Validation
                         Evolution

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Storage Performance Validation Process
In 3 Simple Steps

          Iterate on different products & configurations

 1    Create                2     Run                 3    Analyze
      Model                      Tests                     Results
 Create storage            Connect storage           Find performance
 workload emulations       systems to Load           limits. Compare
 from production data      DynamiX load              latency, throughput &
 or use our sample         generation appliance      IOPS of different
 workloads.                and run the tests.        products and configs.

          Iterate on different model assumptions, scale

                            Deploy In
                         Production with
                           Confidence
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Go Daddy Production Workload
Virtually identical to the one created in Load DynamiX

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Storage Cost Optimization
     Driving cost optimization through technology validation
              Existing Vendor Baseline
                                     Vendor B
                                     23% drop
                                                     Add Compression
                             OS & Disk Change           35% drop
                                56% drop
                                                               Dedupe/Compression
Cost per GB

              Vendor C                                              62% drop
              56% drop
                                                                        Whitebox
                                                                        67% drop

                   Every transition validated
                     with Load DynamiX

              Q1       Q2       Q3         Q4   Q1       Q2       Q3     Q4
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Benefits to Go Daddy by Using Load DynamiX

                        Superior Storage ROI
                        Pick most cost effective
                         solution for workload
 Faster Validation
Weeks to test in lab,
 not 12 months in                            Performance
    production                                 Testing
                                             Confidence in
                                            user experience

   Freedom to
    Innovate
    Insight for                             Availability
  better decision-      Storage            Confidence in 5-
      making            Engineer            9’s under load

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Q&A Session

 Howard Marks       Len Rosenthal
DeepStorage.net   Load DynamiX.com

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