Orange Silicon Valley and Hyve Solutions Attain 1.8 Million IO/s Benchmark

Hyve Solutions, a division of SYNNEX Corp. in purpose-built, datacenter server and storage solutions, is offering an appliance-like system that consistently achieved a benchmark of over 1.8 million I/O transactions IOPS using commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) components from LSI Corp. and Kingston.

The achievement was attained on advanced prototypes built in collaboration with Orange Silicon Valley, a fully owned innovation and research subsidiary of telecom giant Orange. Available, customers can now source this open specification, high performance computing system at a lower cost through Hyve Solutions.

Hyve Solutions brought to the partnership with Orange Silicon Valley its technological expertise and the resources to provide additional support during the evaluation and prototyping phases. The goal was to deliver a cost-effective appliance-like system that is capable of processing one million or more I/O transactions per second. Additionally, Orange Silicon Valley was exploring alternatives to database platforms comprised of JBOD-based storage systems with DAS using SSD and considered building one with COTS components instead of the more expensive bundled solutions.

With a set of prototype design specifications from Orange Silicon Valley, Hyve Solutions concluded that LSI was the logical choice for Orange Silicon Valley’s storage controller performance targets due to the range of the LSI’s product portfolio, field-tested reliability, maturity of designs and organizational depth. Hyve’s recommendations included a 1600MHz Sandy Bridge-based platform with eight of the new PCIe 3.0 slots, 128GB of Kingston DDR III, three LSI MegaRAID SATA SAS 9265-8i RAID controllers and 24 400GB Kingston E100 SSDs to meet Orange Silicon Valley’s requirement for performance, data protection, scalability and cost.

According to SVP and GM of Hyve Solutions, Steve Ichinaga, "Orange Silicon Valley thought through their technical and business requirements in great detail. We got to work and got creative so we could provide a higher level of consultancy to solve their tough technical problems and exceed their goals."

In the Hyve Solutions Proof-of-Concept lab, very close to a million IOPS was reached on the first test run. The system was tuned up until 1.8 million IOPS was reached consistently, as measured with IOMeter. System-wide cost savings have been estimated by Orange Silicon Valley to be between 50% and 75%, excluding any benefits that may accrue as a result of the smaller system footprint or lower power and cooling expenses.

"We have exceeded our preconceived notion of a scalability barrier of 1.0 million IOPS – akin t Chuck Yeager’s crossing the sound barrier in 1947. Extreme Computing is now a commodity. Now that we have shown that it can be done, anybody else can build this," said Christian Eychene, VP IT Infrastructure Technologies and Engineering at Orange. "From here, we intend to expand our testing to a more real-world, very high I/O system demanding OLTP use cases. We are benefiting from vastly improved performance as well as considerable cost savings compared to other system configurations."

Users can deploy the MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i in existing HDD-based server environments for performance gains. Alternatively, for users implementing hybrid server platforms based on SSD, the next-generation MegaRAID controllers exploit the potential of SSDs for performance and enterprise reliability. By using advanced MegaRAID Fast Path software, RAID performance can be boosted further by up to three times.

"Reaching the milestone of over 1.8 million IOPS is a powerful achievement that will vastly improve the user’s experience and ability to access information," said Charlie Kawwas, SVP, WW sales at LSI. "LSI is committed to delivering industry-leading technology that can accelerate storage applications, from databases to enterprise systems that power the Cloud. LSI is proud to have collaborated with Hyve and Kingston to help achieve this impressive goal."

"Working with Orange Silicon Valley, LSI and Hyve Solutions to take commercially available off-the-shelf components to achieve this milestone in IOPS delivery was an exciting opportunity," said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston. "Kingston is committed to working closely with the industry to help move new technology into mainstream IT to solve complex business problems at an affordable price point."