Mellanox Improves Software-Defined Storage Performance

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. has produced a set of storage performance benchmark results working with partners and customers-that demonstrate an increase in performance for Red Hat Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage with network connections at speeds up to 100Gb/s.

Mellanox partnered with Red Hat, Inc. and its partners, including SanDisk Corporation, Scalable Informatics, Inc., Super Micro Computer, Inc. , and Storage Foundry, to show the benefits of using fast, low-latency 10, 40, 56, and 100GbE networks for Ceph Storage clusters. These solutions allow larger and faster Ceph Storage Daemon (OSD) servers when using all-flash configurations or large numbers of HDDs in each server to perform beyond standard 10Gb networking, making Ceph Storage deployments high performing and cost effective.

Ceph Storage is well suited for archival and rich media and cloud infrastructure workloads, such as OpenStack. As enterprise and cloud customers evaluate and deploy Ceph Storage on faster servers, with more flash, and for more demanding users, they are looking to faster networking solutions to increase performance.

“Mellanox is investing heavily in delivering the benefit of high speed networks to Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage customers,” said Kevin Deierling, VP marketing, Mellanox. “We see a groundswell of interest in using software-defined storage and in deploying Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage with 10, 40, 56 and 100GbE network speeds in order to maximize performance and support flash storage and new workloads such as SQL databases and big data.“

Mellanox, Red Hat, Seagate Technology LLC , and Supermicro are in an ongoing Ceph Storage benchmarking project to demonstrate the performance with various combinations of flash and HDDs. The first phase proved the following benefits of using 40GbE instead of 10GbE networks:

• Increases large read performance up to 100% for Red Hat Ceph Storage servers with 72 drives and up to 20% for Red Hat Ceph Storage servers with 36 disks.

• Reduces read and write latency up to 50%

• Provides optimal price performance for write-intensive workloads on large-capacity Red Hat Ceph Storage servers

Scalable Informatics has been collaborating with Mellanox and Red Hat using 100GbE networking on an all-flash based Unison Ceph Storage appliance. They have demonstrated 8GB/s+ reads from disk between a single appliance and client using Ceph Storage. This combination provides an incredibly dense, high performance Ceph Storage SSD solution with simplified networking.

In addition, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) – supporting both RoCE and IB – is available as a technology preview in the Ceph Hammer community release and has recently been enhanced in Gluster Storage 3.1, having been first made available in Gluster Storage since release 3.0.3 in January 2015. Mellanox testing shows RDMA accelerates Ceph Storage large block random read throughput up to 23% and Ceph Storage small block random read IO/s up to 45%. In addition, RDMA increases Gluster Storage large-file read throughput up to 18%.

“SanDisk has improved Red Hat Ceph Storage performance on flash with our InfiniFlash all-flash storage system, demonstrating a fourfold to tenfold increase in Red Hat Ceph Storage IO/s,” said Gary Lyng, senior director, solutions and product marketing, enterprise solutions, SanDisk. “By working with Mellanox and leveraging its 40GbE networking, we can help enable Red Hat Ceph Storage for new workloads and offer a high performance solution at an unprecedented cost structure. We look forward to continuing our work with Red Hat, Mellanox and the open source community to help increase Red Hat Ceph Storage performance and expanding workloads even further.“

“Testing of an all-flash configuration with Mellanox 100GbE networking and our SSDs based Unison Ceph Appliance let us achieve a sustained 8+ GB/s from a single server to a single client,” said Russell Nordquist, systems engineering manager, Scalable Informatics, (Hyper-converged appliance vendor headquartered in Plymouth, MI, that sells storage and analytics appliances to the financial services, pharmaceutical, and research customers.) “Our appliances are designed t support incredibly high IO rates, and leveraging Mellanox’s 100GbE networking allows us to serve the data at twice the speed as before over a single link. We have customers now deploying Unison Ceph appliances using 100Gb Ethernet and flash drives to handle bigger and faster workloads beyond the traditional archive and object storage.“

“Storage is a big challenge for everyone, and we’re all hunting for a simple, scalable, and cost-effective answer,” said Craig Forbes, product manager, storageFOUNDRY. “Those requirements created the Nautilus line of software-centric storage systems, a hybrid of hardware and software technologies that include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Ceph Storage. For the connectivity of Nautilus, Mellanox creates an amazing high-speed network using their 10GbE-56GbE ConnectX-based adapters and SwitchX-2 switches, which have allowed us to support over 3700MB/sec for a single client connecting to Nautilus via NFS.“

“Supermicro’s longstanding relationship with Mellanox and Red Hat enables innovation across our server and storage portfolio including 2U TwinPro and 36, 72, and 90x hot-swap Double-Sided Storage solutions,” said Don Clegg, VP, marketing and business development, Supermicro. “Our collaborative efforts on high performance networking are helping drive the next generation of software-defined storage. With the Supermicro advantage, customers have the performance, flexibility and manageability to deliver cloud scale applications.“

RDMA networking complements the low latency of PCIe flash media. Gluster Storage test results using 4-node Gluster system with four clients, using two PCIe flash drives per node with RDMA vs. TCP using all-flash media show the following performance improvements:

1MB block random IO (Gluster):

• Reads: RDMA does 13.03 million IO/s vs. 8.25 million with TCP – 57% performance improvement

• Writes: RDMA does 2.08 million IO/s vs. 1.39 million with TCP – 49% performance improvement 16KB block random IO (Gluster):

• Reads: RDMA does 2.08 million IO/s vs. 1.39 million with TCP – 49 performance improvement

• Writes: RDMA does 0.97 million RDMA vs. 0.82 million with TCP – 18% improvement

Gluster Storage is purpose-built as a scale-out file store with a straightforward architecture suitable for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. Gluster Storage offers mature NFS, SMB and HDFS file interfaces and is well suited for enterprise virtualization, analytics, enterprise sync and share, and rich media workloads.

“To scale to the needs of enterprise IT departments and web-scale service providers, software-defined storage can be deployed with advanced networking capabilities that provide the requisite high throughput, IO/s and low latency,” said Brent Compton, director, ecosystem, storage and big data, Red Hat. “Our benchmark testing shows that certain Red Hat Ceph Storage configurations are faster or more cost effective using 40Gb Ethernet.“

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