Flash can improve the performance of almost anything that it’s placed into, be it a laptop, a desktop, a server or a storage system. But to derive maximum benefit from a flash investment requires first that the combined workloads be able to generate enough performance demand to really push that flash sub-system to its limits. And the storage system infrastructure must not get in the way of delivering that performance. As we discuss in our video with HP, the architectural design is critical to extracting the full performance potential of flash media.
A key problem with most storage systems is not necessarily that they were built during the hard disk era but instead, that they were counting on the latency of disk to hide some of their design weaknesses. This is especially true of a dual controller architecture that is active/passive, meaning that one controller is unused until the primary controller fails. Essentially all I/O goes through that single controller.
Even architectures that claim to be active-active often are not. They simply split the responsibility of LUN assignment between them. For example, volumes A, B and C would be assigned to controller 1 and volumes D, E and F to controller 2. This design creates two problems. First, if volumes A and B become busy at the same time they may out-strip the capabilities of controller 1. Second, if there is a controller failure then all the volumes have to be assigned to the surviving controller, which means performance can be cut in half.
While these concerns were also relevant in the disk based era, they are even more so in the flash based era since flash systems are usually brought in to specifically address demanding storage I/O workloads.
As we discuss in the above video, solutions like HP’s 7450 All-Flash Array not only brings flash efficiency features like deduplication to enterprises, it also brings an architecture that is able to make sure that flash reaches it optimal levels of performance when pushed. Their multi-controller, mesh architecture makes sure that every controller is actively involved in moving I/O through the system to each volume.
For more on the HP 7450 read our recent Briefing Note: “Enterprise All-Flash – HP StoreServ 7450 All-Flash Array“.
This Video is Sponsored by HP
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