Enabling Greater Performance and Efficiency with Hybrid...

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of Hybrid Storage Pools and how they can help businesses meet growing

demands for storage I/O throughput in today’s data-intensive applications. Hybrid Storage Pools enable

a new approach to storage architectures that can help organizations benefit from increased performance,

reduced costs, and simplified management.

ENABLING GREATER PERFORMANCE AND EFFICIENCY WITHHYBRID STORAGE POOLSWhite Paper December 2009

Sun Microsystems, Inc.Sun Microsystems, Inc.2 Enabling Greater Performance and Efficiency with Hybrid Storage Pools

Table of Contents

Executive Summary ........................................................................................3

A New Approach to Storage Architectures ............................................................. 3

Business Benefits of Hybrid Storage Pools ............................................................ 4

Challenges with Traditional Storage Approaches ...............................................5

Flash Technology and Hybrid Storage Pools ......................................................7

Cost and Performance Tradeoffs ........................................................................... 8

Using Flash Technology in a Tier 0 Configuration ................................................... 8

Hybrid Storage Pools Provide a New Approach ...................................................... 9

Sun Hybrid Storage Pools and the Solaris ZFS™ File System .................................... 9

Transparent Storage Optimization ...................................................................... 11

Business Value of Hybrid Storage Pools .......................................................... 12

Improving Productivity ..................................................................................... 12

Enabling Flexibility for New Types of Solutions ................................................... 12

Radically Simplifying Enterprise Storage ............................................................ 13

Lowering Both Acquisition Costs and Ongoing Costs ............................................ 13

Conserving Datacenter Resources ...................................................................... 14

Business Value Scenarios ................................................................................... 14

Conclusion ................................................................................................... 16

For More Information ........................................................................................ 16

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 1

Executive Summary

Today’s enterprise applications range from high-volume online transaction processing

(OLTP) and database applications to Web 2.0 and High Performance Computing (HPC)

solutions. Many of these modern applications have become dependent on I/O through-

put for application performance. They require fast access to large volumes of informa-

tion, and are pushing the performance limits of traditional storage architectures.

While it is easy to add storage capacity by adding more disk drives and arrays, it

is not so easy to scale storage I/O performance. As the number of users and the

amount of data stored continue to grow, traditional storage architectures require

more and more disk drive spindles to generate enough I/O throughput to keep up

with the I/O processing speed of servers.

A New Approach to Storage ArchitecturesRecent advances in the production of flash technology have made solid-state drives

(SSDs) and flash array products much more cost-effective, enabling a new approach

to storage architectures using Hybrid Storage Pools (HSPs). HSPs enable multiple

types of storage media to be deployed together and managed as a single pool of

storage. Applications that access the Hybrid Storage Pool can then automatically

take advantage of the different performance and capacity characteristics of the

different types of storage media.

Hybrid Storage Pools utilize the Solaris ZFS™ file system to transparently optimize

data placement across different types of storage media. Frequently used data is di-

rected to a high performance storage area such as enterprise SSDs and less-frequent-

ly used data is placed in a high-capacity area such as mechanical disks. By combining

the high performance of SSDs with high-capacity disks, HSPs enable dramatic perfor-

mance gains while also providing tremendous savings in cost, including savings in

datacenter space, power, and cooling.

Management of a Hybrid Storage Pool is transparent to users and trivial for storage

administrators. HSPs can be quickly and easily deployed, allowing organizations to

immediately tackle pressing application performance bottlenecks. HSPs can also

result in fewer components in the storage infrastructure, thus reducing complexity

and saving on storage administration costs.

3 Executive Summary


Business Benefits of Hybrid Storage PoolsKey business benefits of Hybrid Storage Pools include:

• Increased application performance and massive scalability by utilizing flash tech-

nology to buffer application reads and writes, enabling business applications to

process more revenue-based transactions.

• Radically simplified management, reducing labor costs by eliminating the need

for highly skilled storage administrators, improving productivity, and increasing

service levels through reduced risk of errors.

• Reduced acquisition costs by using high capacity drives and flash storage rather

than expensive 15K RPM disk drives, which often require excess capacity just to

meet I/O throughput requirements.

• Lower ongoing costs because business applications can be scaled without overpro-

visioning capacity and because administrative costs as well as datacenter power,

cooling, and space requirements can be reduced.

Architectures based on Hybrid Storage Pools can cost as little as one-tenth and con-

sume as little as one-fifth the power of traditional monolithic storage pools.

Organizations can immediately begin benefiting from HSPs by deploying Sun™ Open

Storage solutions with ZFS. Sun™ Storage 7000 systems, for example, are appliances

that can include flash technology and have HSPs already implemented within the

appliance. HSPs can also be incorporated into an existing or customized storage

infrastructure by leveraging the ZFS capabilities for Hybrid Storage Pools that are

present in the open-source OpenSolaris™ Operating System (OS). This enables HSPs

to be implemented on storage offerings from other vendors as well.

4 Executive Summary


Chapter 2

Challenges with Traditional Storage Approaches

Today’s faster servers allow business and technical applications to serve thousands

of users and generate millions of data records. As data volumes and user activ-

ity continue to grow, however, traditional storage solutions are presenting severe

limitations. Today’s storage administrators and IT managers are faced with three key

challenges for their datacenter storage:

• Application performance bottlenecks

Advances in server technology have yielded extremely fast multicore servers that

are approaching I/O processing capabilities in excess of one million I/O operations

Per Second (IOPS). Hard disk drive performance, however, has lagged behind the

recent dramatic gains in server performance. Disk drive performance is largely

constrained by disk drive rotational speeds, which have increased by a small frac-

tion compared to server performance gains. Today’s fastest disk drives are capable

of 300 to 400 IOPS. Thus nearly three thousand drives would be required to match

the one million IOPS of today’s servers.

• Unsustainable costs

Scaling to meet the performance requirements of today’s I/O intensive applica-

tions can be a very costly undertaking using traditional storage architectures.

To compensate for the performance gap and slow seek times of hard disk drives,

IT managers generally employ one of two approaches as shown in Figure 1. Appli-

cation data is either spread across a large pool of high-performance 15K RPM disk

drives, or some portion of the application data set is maintained in a large buffer

of DRAM or SSD storage to reduce latency.

Deploying a large pool of spinning disks effectively multiplies storage I/O through-

put by enabling read and write operations to be performed in parallel. However,

it can require large quantities of hard disk drives to keep up with today’s server

performance needs and maintain SLA requirements. This approach results in high

costs due to the excessive power requirements of high-speed drives. And, because

drives are often only partially filled, this results in poor utilization of datacenter

space, power, and cooling resources.

The second approach of implementing a Tier 0 storage solution using DRAM or

SSDs can speed performance by providing lower latency access. Sometimes an

entire application working set can be held in DRAM. However, DRAM and SSDs are

much more costly to acquire than disk drives and can significantly add to storage

management complexity when used in a Tier 0 storage environment where admin-

istrators often manually move data to help optimize performance.

5 Challenges with Traditional Storage Approaches


Figure 1. Traditional options for extending storage performance are becoming too costly.

• Complex storage management

Not only are today’s applications processing greater volumes of data, but much

of the data must also be maintained over time and securely shared throughout

a global community of users. Traditional means of deploying and managing stor-

age are becoming outdated as the volume of data under management increases.

Storage administrators must manage vast arrays of storage and are finding it

increasingly difficult to identify and quickly fix storage performance and availabil-

ity issues. This not only affects application service levels, but also results in higher

administration costs.

Most of today’s storage systems require a highly trained administrator to provision

and actively manage the environment. Often there is a need to manually provi-

sion storage or manually move data to continually adjust application performance

as business needs change. Even in cases where hierarchical storage management

(HSM) solutions are deployed, the degree of manual intervention needed to opti-

mize performance for high throughput applications can make storage administration

costly. HSM solutions are very cost-effective for managing data migration to an ar-

chival tier. However, they are less effective when attempting to maintain frequently

used data in a Tier 0 cache storage solution. They often require manual intervention

for performance optimization or a costly deployment strategy that includes over-

provisioning the high performance storage media so that more data can be cached.

It is becoming impractical to meet today’s performance needs with traditional stor-

age architectures. The next level of application performance requires a new and

more cost-effective storage architecture that can help prevent storage I/O bottle-

necks and help bring down storage costs.

6 Challenges with Traditional Storage Approaches

Traditional Storage Approaches

Utilize large pool of high-RPM, high-power disk drives to increase IOPS

Store working set in DRAMto avoid latency


Chapter 3

Flash Technology and Hybrid Storage Pools

Flash memory is low-cost, non-volatile computer memory that can be electrically

erased and rewritten. Several advancements in flash technology characteristics are

making it possible to utilize flash technology and enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs)

to optimize the storage hierarchy in enterprise storage implementations to offer

improved throughput:

• High performance

Flash technology completes operations in microseconds, placing it between hard

disk drives (milliseconds) and DRAM (nanoseconds) for access time. Because flash

technology contains no moving parts, enterprise SSDs can avoid the seek times

and rotational latencies associated with traditional hard disk drives and thus pro-

vide tens of thousands of IOPS compared to hundreds of IOPS for hard disk drives.

• Low power consumption

Because flash integrated circuits have no motors or other mechanical parts,

enterprise SSDs consume a fraction of the power of conventional hard disk drives.

In fact, enterprise SSDs use only 5 percent of the power used by hard disk drives

when idle, and as little as 15 percent when performing operations. Enterprise

SSDs also produce less heat in the system chassis, providing relief for both power

and cooling costs.

• Low cost

While Flash devices are more expensive per gigabyte than a comparable disk

drive, they are much less expensive in terms of cost/IOPS. Hard disk drives cost ap-

proximately $1.25/IOPS, compared to only $0.02/IOPS for enterprise SSDs. When

used with Hybrid Storage Pools, flash technology enables dramatic reductions in

acquisition cost compared to a similar performing solution based solely on hard

disk drives.

• High reliability

While enterprise SSDs provide similar functionality to traditional hard drives, they

offer improved reliability. Both hard disk drives and enterprise SSDs support bad

block management, wear leveling, and error correction codes (ECC) to foster data

integrity. However, unlike hard drives, enterprise SSDs contain no moving parts.

Data is stored on integrated circuits that can withstand significant shock and vibra-

tion. In fact, enterprise SSDs operate in a wider thermal operating range and wider

operational vibration range than hard disk drives to deliver significantly higher

Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) (2.0 million hours versus 1.2 million hours).

These characteristics of enterprise flash technology make it a strong alternative or

adjunct to HDDs, providing a means to rebalance system and storage I/O perfor-

mance using Hybrid Storage Pools.

7 Flash Technology and Hybrid Storage Pools


Cost and Performance TradeoffsToday’s organizations often use multiple media types in their storage infrastructure

because there are cost and performance tradeoffs with different media types. As

shown in Figure 2, there is an inverse correlation between cost per GB of storage and

the time required to retrieve the first byte of data. Tape libraries, for example, clearly

provide the lowest cost/GB, but can only be used for archival purposes due to their

slow access speed.

Time to First Byte

$ per GB

HighPerformance15,000 RPMDisk Drives

HighCapacity

7,200 RPMDisk Drives

SequentialTape

~100 MB/s

Enterprise SSD

DRAM

Figure 2. Hybrid Storage Pools enable organizations to take advantage of the different cost and performance characteristics of different media types.

Enterprise flash and SSD technologies fall in a cost and performance sweet spot be-

tween mechanical drives and DRAM. They are non-volatile and significantly cheaper

than DRAM. They also offer much higher performance and greater power efficiency

than hard disk drives. Deploying new architectures with flash technology can enable

significantly greater performance while also reducing the number of servers and

storage devices required to support today’s applications.

Using Flash Technology in a Tier 0 ConfigurationReplacing all hard disk drives with enterprise SSDs is not economical for most data-

center storage infrastructures. One strategy that is commonly deployed is the use of

a Tier 0 configuration that acts as a read cache for frequently used data. Deploying

flash technology to hold actively used data in Tier 0 can have a big impact on perfor-

mance as long as the most active data is actually kept in this tier.

However, in most cases, there is no automatic way to determine which data sets

from which applications will be most actively used and thus should be maintained

in Tier 0. As business needs change and different sets of data become the most



active, something must be done to recalibrate storage performance. Storage admin-

istrators must therefore monitor storage usage patterns and make decisions about

which data sets should be maintained in Tier 0. This often involves manually moving

data into or out of Tier 0. As mentioned earlier, HSM solutions are sometimes used

for this type of data management, but have proven to be only moderately effective

at reducing the manual effort involved.

Thus, while the Tier 0 approach can improve performance, it can add to manage-

ment complexity and it does not eliminate the need for high performance disk drives

that are used for Tier 1. Thus, it provides only a moderate cost savings and can add

complexity.

Hybrid Storage Pools Provide a New ApproachIn order to fully utilize the strengths of both SSD technology and hard disk drives, a

new approach is needed. What is needed is a file system that recognizes different

types of storage media and can transparently optimize data placement to drive bet-

ter application and file system performance.

With Sun’s Hybrid Storage Pools, enterprise SSDs can be used to assist hard disk

drives by caching frequently accessed data to minimize the impact of disk latencies

and improve application performance. Because enterprise SSDs offer low latency,

they can generally keep up with CPU I/O throughput, and hard disk drives can then

be used to store massive data sets. Hybrid Storage Pools provide the means to auto-

mate the process of keeping the most active data in the enterprise SSD reach cache

while also buffering data writes in a separate cache area.

The most significant effect of using Hybrid Storage Pools for this task is that it can

drive enough performance to enable high speed fibre channel drives to be replaced

by high capacity drives. These high capacity drives, which are often SATA drives, enable

dramatic cost reductions in storage acquisition costs. At the same time, storage

administrators are freed from the laborious task of ongoing storage optimization

efforts.

Thus HSPs give organizations an economical way to achieve significant performance

gains without sacrificing capacity while also helping to reduce storage administra-

tion costs. The following chapter provides additional information about the cost

savings when HSPs are used instead of a Tier 0 approach.

Sun Hybrid Storage Pools and the Solaris ZFS™ File SystemUnlike less sophisticated file systems, ZFS recognizes different media types and will

optimize how it handles each type to help maximize system throughput. ZFS also

automates the process of data placement so that administration efforts and the risk

of human errors are greatly reduced.


Sun Microsystems, Inc.10 Flash Technology and Hybrid Storage Pools

ZFS uses Hybrid Storage Pools to provide both simplicity of management and greater

flexibility for optimizing performance. Hybrid Storage Pools typically include DRAM,

a read cache, a write cache, and a high-capacity storage area. Each of these different

storage categories may be implemented with different types of storage media, or

they may all be made up of the same media.

Each category within the HSP storage hierarchy is defined according to its capa-

bilities (high-capacity, write cache, etc.). It is most common for the high-capacity

storage area to be implemented with media such as 1TB SATA drives spinning at 7200

RPMs and for the read and write cache areas to be implemented with enterprise

SSDs. However, there is no reason that the high-capacity storage area could not be

implemented with enterprise SSDs as well. In some applications such as database

or OLTP, it may be appropriate to use SSDs in the high-capacity area if the data set is

large and performance is also a critical success factor.

Regardless of media types used, ZFS transparently manages the combined storage

areas are as a single pool of storage. Hybrid Storage Pools essentially isolate appli-

cations from the underlying physical media as shown in Figure 3. Applications can

thus transparently utilize multiple types of storage media to take advantage of their

different price and performance characteristics. When flash technology is used in the

read cache area, for example, applications can access the most active data at speeds

that are up to 100 times faster than with hard disk drives alone. This enables Hybrid

Storage Pools to deliver the high performance of SSDs while also enabling higher ROI

through the use of potentially different media for high-capacity storage.

Figure 3. Hybrid Storage Pools isolate applications from the physical storage media, enabling ZFS to optimize performance across multiple media types.


Transparent Storage OptimizationIn ZFS, synchronous writes are first executed to a write cache that typically consists

of DRAM and write-optimized SSDs. The writes can then be quickly acknowledged,

allowing the application to continue processing while data is automatically flushed

to high capacity storage. Data migration to the high capacity area is managed in ZFS

as a background task that is transparent to both users and administrators.

ZFS also manages the process of copying frequently accessed data into a high-per-

formance read cache. The read cache typically consists of read-optimized SSDs that

enable data to be transparently retrieved by applications with very low latency.

ZFS looks at usage patterns to determine whether and how to use the different stor-

age media. For example, large synchronous writes, such as video streaming, do not

benefit from caching, so ZFS does not try to copy this type of data to write cache.

Similarly, the read cache is populated based on an intelligent algorithm that takes

into account not only the most recently used data, but also anticipated read requests

and estimated data to be held in DRAM.

Whereas other solutions generally require a storage administrator to monitor

and manage the environment to continually optimize performance, ZFS virtually

eliminates the need for manual data placement optimization. With ZFS, all data

movement between media types is managed seamlessly and transparently without

intervention from a storage administrator.

More technical information about Hybrid Storage Pools and ZFS can be found in the

white paper titled, “Deploying Hybrid Storage Pools With Flash Technology and the

Solaris ZFS File System.” This paper can be found on the Web at mapping.sun.com/

profile/offer.jsp?id=55.


http://mapping.sun.com/profile/offer.jsp?id=55



Chapter 4

Business Value of Hybrid Storage Pools

Hybrid Storage Pools and enterprise SSDs offer a new paradigm for storage infra-

structures that can help organizations meet their growing performance needs while

delivering dramatic savings over traditional storage solutions. The business benefits

also go beyond performance and economics to include improved user productivity,

greater flexibility to address new business opportunities, improved service levels

through radically simplified storage, and better utilization of datacenter resources.

Improving Productivity Because Hybrid Storage Pools can enable greater throughput and greater availability

for business applications, they can help improve user productivity. Applications can

be scaled to new levels when storage bottlenecks are solved using Hybrid Storage

Pools. This can enable greater numbers of users to be served with fast response

times even during peak usage periods. Without Hybrid Storage Pools, it can be very

costly or even impractical to deliver high service levels for growing user populations

and their growing storage I/O throughput requirements. HSPs not only make it

affordable to meet these needs, but also provide a scalable growth path to meet

future requirements. HSPs also help reduce complexity of the storage environment,

thus lowering the risk of mistakes that can lead to downtime and productivity loss.

Enabling Flexibility for New Types of Solutions With HSPs and enterprise SSDs, it is now affordable and practical to build solutions

with very high storage I/O throughput—solutions that may not have been practical

using traditional approaches. For example, a survey of High Performance Computing

(HPC) users by IDC indicated that more than 90% of respondents were concerned

about I/O in general and expected further I/O constraints in the coming years1. The

problems sets for HPC applications are large enough that there are always new ways

to use more computing power when it becomes available and is affordable. Similarly,

the scalability requirements for Web applications are constantly increasing. Web

businesses can often increase revenue by supporting greater numbers of users and/

or greater levels of user activity.

Other application types such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and data marts

can also be used in new ways when they can support a greater volume of transac-

tions or greater volumes of data. Hybrid Storage Pools provide the means by which

to address new types of business problems by making it more affordable and more

practical to deliver higher volumes of data to today’s high powered servers.

12 Business Value of Hybrid Storage Pools

1 “HPC Storage and Data Management: User/Vendor Perspectives and Survey Results,” IDC, Doc # 206967, June 2007.


Radically Simplifying Enterprise Storage HSPs enable a radical simplification of the storage environment by automatically

optimizing data placement and data retrieval. Unlike HSM solutions that require

significant administration support, HSPs deliver optimized throughput with virtually

no manual intervention. This not only saves on administration costs, but also helps

improve service levels due to the reduced risk of mistakes. HSPs also automatically

adjust to usage patterns, thus avoiding the need for performance tuning, which can

also be hit and miss in traditional storage solutions.

Secondly, HSPs enable the storage infrastructure to deliver equivalent levels of

performance with far fewer devices. A single enterprise SSD device can deliver the

equivalent I/O throughput of 100 disk drives. Fewer devices makes the environment

much easier to manage, resulting in reduced administration costs and better reliabil-

ity due to reduced risk of device failures or human errors.

Lowering Both Acquisition Costs and Ongoing CostsOne of the greatest benefits of Hybrid Storage Pools is the cost savings that result

from being able to use high-capacity disk drives rather than 15K PRM drives. High-

capacity 7,200 RPM drives operate on about half the power of 15K RPM drives and

are generally less than one-tenth as expensive to acquire in cost per GB. Enterprise

SSDs, while more expensive to acquire, use less than 1/100th of the power of 15K

RPM drives, saving thousands of dollars annually in power costs in cases where SSDs

supplant hundreds or thousands of 15K RPM drives.

As shown in Figure 4, using SSDs with HSPs enables significantly more savings than

if SSDs are used in Tier 0 configuration. The reason for this is that HSPs allow the

use of 1 TB SATA drives instead of the more expensive 15K RPM Fibre Channel drives

while still delivering the same I/O throughput performance and providing the same

capacity. When SSDs are used in the Tier 0 configuration (middle bar), there is still

a large need for 15K RPM drives resulting in higher costs.

HSPs can also help reduce the ongoing cost of maintaining performance as user

demands grow. By using high-capacity, low RPM drives and enterprise SSDs instead

of partially populated 15K RPM drives, less capital expense is required and complex-

ity can also be greatly reduced. Application performance can be accelerated instantly

and efficiently without having to buy more high-performance disk drives and without

adding as many new devices to the environment.

13 Business Value of Hybrid Storage Pools

Sun Microsystems, Inc.14 Business Value of Hybrid Storage Pools

Figure 4. Hybrid Storage Pools enable much lower acquisition costs because high-capacity SATA drives can be used instead of 15K Fibre Channel disks.

Conserving Datacenter ResourcesBecause HSPs enable storage solutions with significantly fewer disk drives as well as

much lower power and cooling requirements, they can help businesses expand the

throughput of their applications without a costly datacenter expansion. By replacing

partially filled 15K RPM hard disk drives with enterprise SSDs and high capacity disk

drives, organizations can dramatically reduce the footprint of their storage infrastruc-

ture while increasing its I/O throughput at the same time. The resulting reduction in

power requirements also enables datacenter power resources to stretch farther.

Acquisition Cost Comparison

Acqu

isit

ion

$

All FC Disk

46TB 46TB

SSD as Tier 0 Drive

46TB

SSD as HybridStorage Pool

8 x 73GB Flash

6 x 100GB Read Flash

156 x 300GB15K FC Disks

8 x 73GB Flash

74 x 300GB15K FC Disks

24 x 1TBSATA

2 x 18GB Write Flash

46 x 1TBSATA

Sun Microsystems, Inc.15 Business Value of Hybrid Storage Pools

Business Value ScenariosA few examples can help illustrate the business and economic benefits of Hybrid

Storage Pools.

Scenario 1 – Reducing total cost of ownershipA customer requires 46 TB of storage for a high performance file system and is

concerned about total cost of ownership as well as data center space. In comparing

a popular solution based on 15K RPM disk drives against a solution based on Hybrid

Storage Pools with the Sun Storage 7410 system, the customer finds that the Sun

Storage 7410 system not only offers significantly lower costs, but also provides the

following key advantages:

• Delivers equivalent throughput and better performance without expensive and

power-hungry 15K RPM drives.

• Provides the same 46 TB capacity in less than one-third the space with its densely

packaged 12 RU system.

• No additional software license fees compared with more than $50,000 in software

licenses required with the alternative system.

When considering total cost of ownership, the differences are staggering. Referring

once again to Figure 4 above, the Sun Storage 7410 system can deliver its high per-

formance with 1 TB SATA drives and a similar amount of flash storage as the Tier 0

solution, resulting in greatly reduced acquisition costs. The Sun Storage 7410 system

also helps reduce ongoing costs through its highly efficient architecture. The overall

savings include:

• Savings of 75% in total cost of ownership over three years.

• Power and cooling costs that are 2.5 times less, resulting in annual savings of

more than $6,800.

• More than 60% lower annual operating costs for power, space and cooling.

• 75% lower initial purchase price for the system and required software licenses.

Scenario 2 – Enabling business expansion without more datacenter spaceA large online service provider hosts private-branded Web-based reservation systems.

Each branded system serves millions of customers and has stringent service level

requirements. With traditional storage technologies, meeting the end user response

times as outlined in service level agreements requires a storage array with 250 15K

SAS drives for each branded system. Unfortunately, the provider has filled their exist-

ing data center and is out of space, power, and cooling. Growing the business would

therefore require building a brand new and costly datacenter.

Hybrid Storage Pools can provide a way to address these restrictions, allowing the ser-

vice provider to expand its storage I/O throughput to meet service level agreements

with significantly fewer disk drives. Thus the hybrid storage pools can help the service

provider grow its business while avoiding the cost of building a brand new datacenter.


Chapter 5

Conclusion

The growing imbalance between I/O throughput of today’s servers and disk drives

is creating a need for a new approach to storage that can deliver high performance

while also reducing cost and complexity. Hybrid Storage Pools provide a means to

virtually eliminate storage performance bottlenecks and deliver dramatic gains in

price/performance.

HSPs enable the use of flash storage to reduce write latency as well as random read

latency, thus creating a system that performs far better and consumes less power

than traditional disk drive only solutions. HSPs have made it possible to construct

systems with a precise mix of read- and write-optimized flash, DRAM, and high-

capacity disks to meet today’s performance and capacity needs. System designers

can thus achieve the right balance of cost and performance for any given workload.

Perhaps most importantly, the ZFS file system automatically directs data to the

appropriate level of the storage hierarchy, thus avoiding the management complex-

ity associated with many HSM environments.

The key business benefits enabled by Hybrid Storage Pools include:

• Performance gains that improve user productivity and enable new types

of applications that were previously impractical.

• Dramatically reduced TCO for high performance storage.

• Radically simplified storage deployment and management.

For More InformationFor additional information on Sun Hybrid Storage Pools and related technologies,

visit the Web sites in Table 1 or contact a local Sun representative.

Table 1. Web links for additional information.

Web Site URL Description

sun.com/flash Sun Flash Storage offerings

sun.com/solaris/zfs Solaris ZFS file system

sun.com/storage Sun storage solutions

blogs.sun.com/ahl/date/20081201 Adam Leventhal blog post, “Casting the shadow of the Hybrid Storage Pool”

mapping.sun.com/profile/offer.jsp?id=55 “Deploying Hybrid Storage Pools With Flash Technology and the Solaris ZFS File System,” a Sun BluePrints™ Online publication

16 Conclusion

http://sun.com/flash

http://sun.com/solaris/zfs

http://sun.com/storage

http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/date/20081201


Sun Microsystems, Inc. 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA Phone 1-650-960-1300 or 1-800-555-9SUN (9786) Web sun.com


© 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, OpenSolaris, Solaris, ZFS, and Sun BluePrints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiar-ies in the United States and other countries. Information subject to change without notice. Printed in USA 12/09

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