Post on 13-Jan-2017
How Networking Affects Flash Storage
Systems
Gunna Marripudi
Tameesh Suri
Samsung Semiconductor Inc.
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
1
SSD Interface Improvements
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
2
Latency is ~60% lower
IOPS is 2 to 8x better
Throughput is 2 to 6x
better
High-performance networking and
higher performance SSD devices
New design considerations
to achieve high performance!
Storage System Design Choices
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
3
Placement of NVMe drives and NICs
Interrupt Management
CPU cores
Symmetry
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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Local Socket Latency* Remote Socket Latency*
80-110ns 120-160ns
Asymmetry
NIC NVMe NVMe NIC
* Idle latency measured on different generations of Intel processors using : https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intelr-memory-latency-checker
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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System Dual socket x86
server
2x40GbE RDMA NICs
10 NVMe SSDs
Linux 3.14 kernel
iSER LIO stack
Test Configuration
Performance Comparison
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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Storage stack architecture will influence the choice between Symmetric and Asymmetric configurations
Asymmetric Symmetric
1x
2.1x
4K Random Read
Asymmetric Symmetric
1x 1x
128K Sequential Read
Interrupt Management
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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NVMe drives and NICs can consume lot of interrupts
They can target interrupts to multiple cores
Interrupt to CPU core affinity improves performance
Operating system tools to manage interrupts do so without any specific knowledge of NIC and SSD association
Test Configuration
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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System Dual socket x86
server
1x40GbE RDMA NICs
5 NVMe SSDs
Linux 3.14 kernel
iSER LIO stack
Performance Comparison
(Symmetric Configuration)
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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Two approaches in
interrupt
management
Using irqbalance
in Linux
Assigned NIC and
NVMe drive
interrupts to specific
CPU cores
Interrupt Management in Action
(Symmetric Configuration)
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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No IRQ
Balancing
Manual NIC
and NVMe
interrupt
assignment to CPU cores
CPU Core Count in the System
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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Resource contention from 3 sources High-speed NICs
High-performance NVMe drives
Storage stack processing
High volume dual socket servers can support a wide range of cores 8 to 36 cores* (with HT off)
* Source: http://ark.intel.com/products/family/78583/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-v3-Family#@Server
Performance Comparison
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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Storage Stack 1
1x40GbE
4 NVMe SSDs
Storage Stack 2
4x40GbE
20 NVMe SSDs
Summary
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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• Choose Symmetric or Asymmetric design as driven by the storage stack architecture
Placement of NVMe drives and NICs
• Explicit mapping of NIC and NVMe drive interrupts to CPU cores can improve performance
Interrupt Management
• Use the appropriate core count to accommodate increased contention for CPU resources
CPU cores in the system
High performance networking complements higher
performance SSDs to deliver high performance!
Flash Memory Summit 2015
Santa Clara, CA
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Questions?
g.marripudi@ssi.samsung.com
tameesh.suri@ssi.samsung.com