Solid State Storage

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The Abstracts

Apples to Apples, Pears to Pears in SSS Performance Benchmarking
Esther Spanjer
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It is becoming increasingly important to understand the full performance characteristics of a solid state drive. Unfortunately, reviewing the product specifications or running some standard benchmark test suites do not always paint a clear picture of what an SSD is capable of. A variety of parameters can influence the performance behavior of a solid state drive: current and previous workloads, fragmentation, block size, read/write mix, and queue depth to name a few. This Technical Working Group of SNIA has dedicated an entire year to come up with a benchmark specification that will allow for a standard benchmark test suite. Following this test suite will allow engineers to compare apples to apples when evaluating different SSD devices, as well as making sure that they choose the right SSD for their workload. This presentation will provide an overview of the SNIA Solid State Storage Performance Test Suite Specification (to be published in early 2010). It will explain the proposed test procedures, reference platform, and reporting methods. At the end of this tutorial, the audience should be familiar with topics such as pre-conditioning, idle test, steady state, 3D profiling and more.

Learning Objectives

• Get a good understanding of the various parameters that influence the performance characteristic of a solid state drive. Test results will be shared to illustrate the influence of these parameters.
• Get a full understanding of the proposed SNIA performance benchmark standard. Topics that will be discussed include preconditioning, steady state, queue depth, idle tests, random vs. sequential test suites, etc.
• Provide a step-by-step guidance on how to set up a test benchmark that creates equal results among the various SSD devices. Both software and hardware setup will be discussed.

Latency: The Heartbeat of a Solid State Disk
Levi Norman
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This SNW tutorial session is about the number one reason an IT manager would move away from HDDs and towards solid state disks (SSD)...latency. More importantly low latency. Latency becomes less of just a number and more an important metric when considering implementing any serious performance storage related solution. Today low latency can only effectively be addressed by one particular type of storage architecture and that’s an enterprise SSD design. Latency in a technical environment is synonymous with delay. More succinctly latency in terms of a SSD is how long it will take for a request to complete its round trip cycle from the time the request enters the device to the time that it leaves the device with the “payload” in tow. In a storage world where metrics such as $/GB are entrenched as a de-facto standard of measurement, and $/IOPS has arisen to become a “relevant” metric, we continue to miss a critical discussion point. And that is that low latency is the most important thing that can be delivered to a performance sensitive application or a workhorse database environment. In this session we will discuss the merits of low latency solutions and what they mean when coupled with a high IOPS and a large bandwidth design. From a business perspective, low latency will be discussed in terms of how it saves money, makes money or ideally does both for an enterprise organization.

Learning Objectives

• Latency, what is it?
• Why does latency matter, no one seems to be really talking about it?
• How coupling low latency to high IOPS and generous bandwidth creates true performance solutions.

The Benefits of Solid State in Enterprise Storage Systems: Today and Tomorrow
David Dale
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ATargeted primarily at an IT audience, this tutorial presents a brief overview of the solid state technologies which are being integrated into Enterprise Storage Systems today, including technologies, form factors, and price/performance roadmaps. It then goes on to describe where they fit into typical Enterprise Storage architectures today, with descriptions of specific use cases and benefits. Finally the presentation speculates on how SSS price, performance and capacity advances in the future will change this picture.

Learning Objectives

• Identify the features and roadmaps of solid state storage devices being integrated into enterprise storage systems
• Describe where and how these devices fit into Enterprise Storage System architectures, with features, benefits and typical use cases for each approach.
• Describe how advances in SSS devices will change the architectural integration picture and benefits in the future.

Using SSD MLC NAND in Datacenter Applications
Tony Roug
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SSD vendors have typically focus on SLC as the datacenter NAND SSD technology. Primarily because of the endurance and write performance of SLC NAND. For many usages, MLC NAND is more cost effective and can support the endurance and write performance required by the end user. This course outline how MLC is a cost effective solution for datacenter applications.

Learning Objectives

• Understand tradeoffs for SLC NAND versus MLC NAND in datacenter
• Understand how for specific applicatins MLC NAND is more cost effective
• Understand how to tune MLC NAND to your application needs

Solid State Storage Architectures
Jamon Bowen
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The field of SSS has expanded into multiple classes of offerings (RAM, Enterprise Flash, and Consumer Flash) and ways to deploy the technology (form factor SSDs, PCIe, and rack mount). This presentation will quickly cover the features, relative costs, and performance of the different architectures as well as examples of the best fit applications. A current view of how SSS compare to HDD systems will be presented covering performance, price, and operational costs.
Different methodologies of deploying SSS along side HDD storage will be presented.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the various SSS architectures and the application characteristics that are best suited to each one.
• Learn how to successfully deploy SSS today.