Storage Spaces Direct with Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X

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

First published on TECHNET on Mar 19, 2017
Hello, Claus here again. Today Intel is announcing the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X device family, and of course Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct will support this device. The P4800X device promises better latency and better endurance, so we took these devices for a spin in a Storage Spaces Direct configuration, comparing them to the P3700 devices:

• Hardware Platform
  
  
  
  • 4 Intel® Server Systems S2600WT
  
  
  • 2x Intel® Xeon® E5-2699 v4 @ 2.2 GHz (22c44t)
  
  
  • 128 GB Memory
  
  
  • Mellanox ConnectX®-3 Pro 40GbE
  
  
  
  


• Storage config #1
  
  
  
  • 4x 800GB Intel® P3700 NVMe SSD
  
  
  • 20x 1.2TB Intel® S3610 SATA SSD
  
  
  
  


• Storage config #2
  
  
  
  • 2x 375GB Intel® P4800X NVMe SSD
  
  
  • 20x 1.2TB Intel® S3610 SATA SSD
  
  
  
  

Notice that we have half the devices and a quarter the capacity for the Intel™ Optane™ P4800X device. The software and workload configuration were:

• Software configuration
  
  
  
  • Single pool
  
  
  • 4x 2TB 3-copy mirror volume
  
  
  • ReFS/CSVFS file system
  
  
  • 176 VM (44 VMs per server)
  
  
  • 1 virtual core and 1.75 GB RAM
  
  
  
  


• Workload configuration
  
  
  
  • DISKSPD workload generator
  
  
  • VMFleet workload orchestrator
  
  
  • Each VM with
    
    
    
    • 4K IO size
    
    
    • 10GB working set
    
    
    • 90% read and 10% write mix
    
    
    • Storage QoS used to control IOPS / VM
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

The test results are captured in the diagram below:





The first observation is that we see a 90µs latency improvement across the board from low IOPS to high IOPS. This pretty much aligns with the latency improvements in the device itself, and notice how the improvement is realized at the top of the storage stack in a fully resilient storage configuration. This means that customers can realize the latency improvements provided by the P4800X device in their Storage Spaces Direct deployments.

The second observation is that we see the same CPU utilization at 880K IOPS (throttled by Storage QoS), with 258µs latency on the P4800X devices vs 344µs latency on the P3700 devices, meaning that Storage Spaces Direct customers can realize the latency improvements without any additional CPU consumption.

Let me know what you think.

Until next time

Claus