Boosting Server Performance

SSD Performance Accelerated

A typical flash implementation constitutes less than 1% of the overall storage provisioned in a typical production environment. Consequently, systems planners have to exercise extreme prudence when deciding how to best utilize flash storage. They have to decide between statically placing data or leveraging some sort of caching or tiering technology. Automated solutions are immensely more popular, and have led to a plethora of caching software options; once again storage planners have to sort through all the noise to find the right solution.

Precision Strike

Intel’s Cache Acceleration Software (CAS), may be a potential solution to enable businesses to efficiently reap the speeds of server based flash while helping guarantee that mission critical data will always have priority accessing flash resources. By relieving performance constraints directly at the physical or virtual server level, Intel’s CAS solution is a surgical approach towards remedying I/O bottlenecks.

Through selective, optimized caching, CAS allows application and storage planners to specify at a file level, like a single tablespace, which critical data sets need to have priority access to flash resources. Priorities can also be assigned by application, file name/type and directory path. Likewise, data can be excluded from utilizing cache resources altogether. In this manner, IT planners can have the confidence that high value business applications can consistently meet performance SLAs without constantly resorting to budget breaking hardware purchases and upgrades.

Additionally, since CAS is a software based approach for solving performance issues, it involves less effort to deploy and manage. Any SAN based storage that was configured to reduce I/O latency, i.e. A SAN based SSD, may also potentially be re-claimed – presenting additional cost savings opportunities.

Intel’s CAS may also be utilized to manage non volatile flash resources in a storage array. This capability empowers administrators to pool all their existing flash storage, along with any newly acquired flash or SSD, to more effectively control data promotion through all available cache resources.

Virtual Velocity

Intel’s CAS technology is “virtual friendly” in that with its support for vMotion, server and application administrators can move application workloads into newly configured virtual machines (VM) without de-staging data out of the cache. In other words, the CAS will maintain hot data in the cache during virtual machine (VM) migrations. This is a key enabling technology for complimenting business agility.

To further buttress performance in Windows server environments, Intel has integrated their CAS technology to take advantage of the transfer speeds of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) installed on the server motherboard. Through this integration, data can now be promoted into DRAM for ultra high performance (in excess of flash speeds) and still have the protection of backend flash memory should the system lose power.

With imminent support for major Linux operating systems and block based application environments, i.e. Oracle and SAP, Intel’s CAS offers a complete enterprise solution for pro-actively managing I/O application performance workloads across all available cache resources.

The benefits of intelligent multi-level caching with two independent tiers of solid state memory – DRAM and flash NAND – with backend data movement to primary disk based storage, could prove significant for IT users. Increased IOPS and better memory management may enable certain data center environments to achieve higher VM density in their hypervisor server architectures. Thus enabling IT organizations to wring more value out of their existing investments.

Storage Swiss Take

Organizations which are already utilizing flash technology or are considering adding flash storage to their environments, may want to consider the potential benefits of Intel’s Cache Acceleration Software to help them efficiently utilize their investments in flash while enhancing performance SLAs for their high value business applications.

Intel is not a client of Storage Switzerland

About Colm Keegan

As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.