At Storage Switzerland, we have the privilege of talking to IT professionals from around the world about a variety of subjects, one of the most popular of which is storage I/O performance. While IOPS is a familiar discussion point both for vendors and IT pros, it’s not necessarily a great indicator of real performance demands. In fact, the vast majority of data centers need less than 150k IOPS. However, there are a few that do need very high IOPS performance to drive a mission critical application. These extreme environments often need in excess of 500k IOPS. What is interesting is that we seldom find a requirement in between these ranges. Essentially there is a GAP in performance demands between 200k to 500k IOPS.
For the sub-150k IOPS data center, almost any all-flash array and many hybrid flash arrays will be more than adequate. These data centers should be looking at system reliability, capabilities, and of course price. Also these environments tend to have many highly mixed workloads that have a universal need for good performance, not a single workload that demands all of the performance.
Since most flash arrays will handily provide more than 200k IOPS, the debate around the system overhead of such features like deduplication and compression is moot. There is one “gotcha” that IT professionals who work for these data centers need to be aware of. Performance demand will increase over time, virtual environments will become more dense and databases will need to support more users with greater response time. Eventually, the performance gap mentioned above will shift and IT professionals in this first group will want to make sure that their storage system can keep pace.
In the second group (the 500k+ IOPS category) things get a little more interesting. IT planners, at least today, have to choose between all-flash features or dedicated flash system performance. Also, these environments, with the exception of cloud service providers, tend to have a single application that constitutes the bulk of their aggregate performance demand, often a single volume and a single threaded application. There are very few flash arrays that can generate the required 500k+ IOPS on a single volume. Like the sub-200K IOPS group, these data centers will continue to see a demand for greater performance. However, I’m not sure if they will get it, at least with flash technology in a single system. But you can certainly design a system that stripes across flash arrays to generate performance in the million+ IOPS range.
StorageSwiss Take
Both the sub-200K IOPS group and the 500k+ IOPS group have their own unique sets of challenges. The first group has to deal with workload variety, so they will want a flash storage system that can deliver consistent, mixed-workload performance, as well as the ability to scale performance cost effectively in the future. The 500k+ group may need to forego features in order to get performance, but they must be more creative in how they respond to growth or look for ways to better distribute their application so that it can become more parallel in nature.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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