Dedupe, Compression and Pattern-Based Testing for Flash Storage: Getting It Right

Measuring flash array storage performance involves more than just measuring speeds & feeds using common IO tools that where designed for measuring single devices. Many of today's flash-based storage arrays implement sophisticated compression, deduplication and pattern reduction processing to minimize the amount of data written to flash memory in order to reduce storage capacity requirements and extend the life of flash memory. Effectively measuring the performance and capacity of flash-based storage now requires more than the usual steps documented by the SNIA SSSI specification. Instead, testing now requires the inclusion of complex data patterns that effectively stress data reduction technologies like pattern recognition, compression and deduplication. Measuring performance without including these important features or by using tools that offer a limited set of data patterns falsely overstates modern flash array performance. Only by evaluating with these inline data reduction capabilities enabled, based on real-world application workloads, can vendors and customers truly understand the performance, capacity and effectiveness of a particular flash storage array offering these advanced features.

Learning Objectives

How today's flash memory storage arrays implement pattern recognition
What pattern-based performance measurement involve
How an effective performance measurement and validation solution