Storage Spaces Direct on Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Storage at Microsoft articles.

First published on TECHNET on Jul 11, 2017
Hello, Claus here again. As you have probably noticed by now, we have a great ongoing collaboration with Intel. In this blog post we are going to look at Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct on Intel's latest and greatest hardware, which includes a new processor family, Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, an iWARP RDMA network adapter with the integrated Intel® Ethernet Connection X722, and "Intel® Optane™ Solid State Drives.

We use a 4 node cluster, each node with configured with the following hardware (not including boot drive):

• Intel® Server System R2208WF


• 2x Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8168 CPU (24cores @ 2.7Ghz)


• 128GiB DDR4 DRAM


• 2x 375GB Intel® Optane SSD DC P4800X (NVMe SSD)


• 4x 1.2TB Intel® SSD DC S3610 SATA SSD


• Intel® Ethernet Connection X722 with 4x 10GbE iWARP RDMA


• BIOS configuration
  
  
  
  • C States disabled
  
  
  • BIOS performance plan
  
  
  • Turbo On
  
  
  • HT On
  
  
  
  

We deployed Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct and stood up VMFleet with:

• 4x 3-copy mirror CSV volumes


• Cache configured for Read and Write


• 24 VMs per node


• Each VM rate limited to 7,500 IOPS (similar to Azure P40 disk)

Each VM runs DISKSPD , with 4K IO size at 90% read and 10% write rate limited at 7,500IOPS. This produces a total IOPS of ~720K (4 * 24 * 7,500).



Read IO is served at about 80 microseconds ! This is significantly less than anything else we have seen before. Write IO is served at about 300 microseconds . The write latency is higher than read latency mostly due to network latency, as writes are mirrored in 3 copies to peer nodes in the cluster.





In addition, CPU consumption is less than 25%, which means there is plenty of headroom for applications to consume this storage performance.

We are very excited to see these numbers and the value that the new generation of Intel Scalable Processors, Intel Optane DC SSD devices combined with the Intel Ethernet Connection X722 with 4x 10GbE iWARP RDMA adapter can deliver to our joint customers. Let me know what you think.

Please also see the recorded video .

Until next time

Claus