IBM® Edge2013 - Introduction to IBM XIV Storage System

© 2013 IBM Corporation

Session 1029 Introduction to IBM XIV Storage System and What Makes It Unique

Jack Arnold - IT Management Consultant

15 May 2013


IBM Presentation Template Full Version

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XIV – IBM System Storage™

� Founders are 5 graduates of Talpiot

� 14th class (XIV=14 in Roman numerals)

� Chief Architect and IBM Fellow - Moshe Yanai –Formerly EMC’s CTO–Led the development of the Symmetrix and DMX systems

� Founded in 2002

� 1st customer system installed in early 2005http://funds.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000394326&fid=942



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Do It Yourself Supercomputers

“PlayStations power Air Force supercomputer”http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20025680-1.html

http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123233543

(Credit: Air Force Research Laboratory)

“1716 Sony PS3 processors…35th or 36th most powerful supercomputer in the world”



Supercomputers

� Climate change research gets petascale supercomputer

� 1.5-petaflop IBM Yellowstone system runs 72,288 Intel Xeon cores

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http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232382/Climate_change_research_gets_petascale_supercomputer

Image courtesy of



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Cache

� 24GB of per module x 15 modules

� 360 GB of cache – 45 GB for Linux = 315 GB usable

� More than 1 GB of cache per usable TB!



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Cache Is Distributed Not Centralized



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IBM XIV Storage System – 1TB

� 180 disks per rack (12 * 15), each disk is 1TB 7200 RPM

� Single rack provides 79TB usable capacity



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Full Rack Power Consumption

–7.7 KW, 180 1 TB spindles, 79 TB usable capacity, 97 W / TB–7.3 KW, 180 2 TB spindles, 161 TB usable capacity, 45 W / TB–6.7 KW, 180 2 TB spindles, 161 TB usable capacity, 42 W / TB–7.0 KW, 180 3 TB spindles, 243 TB usable capacity, 29 W / TB



XIV SSD Solution

� High capacity SSDs used as secondary read cache

– 480 GB enterprise-class SSD device added to each module

– 7.2 TB of cache per full rack

– Housed in PCI caddy in rear of module

– Scales with the system – 6 to 15 SSD drives

– Must be added to all modules together

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Why 7200 RPM?



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Storage Efficiency

0

100

200

300

400

500

100TB 200TB 400TB 800TB

15K 3.5"

7200 3.5"

Tape

RelativePower @ typical R/W operation load

Source: IBM data, 2009



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IBM XIV Storage System – The Quest

… at 7200 RPM (SATA or NL SAS) cost

Delivering Fibre Channel performance…



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IBM XIV Storage System – The Promise

Tier 1

- Performance

- Reliability

- Capability

At a Tier 2 price!

Or put another way



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Industry Standard Components

Processors – Intel Quad-Core (1 or 2)

Connectivity – 1Gb Ethernet or Infiniband

Disks – standard 7200 RPM (SATA or NL SAS)

Rack – was industry standard (APC), now IBM T42



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Lower TCO

XIV Brand X

(such as E** or H**)

Remote Replication

$$$$ or €€€€

Point in Time Copy

$$$$ or €€€€

Multi-path Drivers

$$$$ or €€€€

Management Software

$$$$ or €€€€

Host Attach $$$$ or €€€€

No additional charge




No additional charge(we use native drivers)



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LUN Creation

�LUNs are allocated in 17 GB chunks

�Volumes can be dynamically resized (increased only)

–Primary and Secondary in a synchronous mirroring relationship will be resized

�User does not plan the layout of the volumes relative to physical drive resources



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LUN Creation

Decisions

�What type of disk (SATA, Fibre Channel)

�What size disk (73GB, 146GB, 300GB, 450GB)

�What speed disk (10K RPM, 15K RPM)

�What RAID level?

�Which set of disks (array)?

�Do I need tiers of storage?

XIV – tierless (tear-less!) storage



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On-going Management Effort: None

All spindles are always utilized

–No management effort or optimization

–No Hot-Spots



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Global Hot Spare Storage Capacity Concept

� Traditional approach

– Dedicated Hot spare drives

� With the IBM XIV Storage System, each disk is utilizing 95% of its space

– The system provides enough hot spare capacity to tolerate a sequence of three disk failures and one module failure, all while still providing redundancy

� Upon a failure, the system returns to redundancy



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Reliability



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XIV Disks Drives 1-12

Drawers 1-15

Break data into1MB chunks



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How Do You Get From 180TB to 79TB?

180 TB-15 drives for redundant capacity for drive and drawer failures- 7 TB for a year’s worth of performance data, system dumps, metadata=158

158 / 2 (for duplicating data) = 79



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All Drives Have Same Amount of Activity

Makes predictive analysis very good



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Aggressive Monitoring of Drives

!



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Aggressive Monitoring of Drives

X

80% of drives returned have been administratively failed



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Performance



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XIV Disks

Drawers 1-15

180 MB LUN(not possible,illustrative purposes only)

Drives 1-12



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Disk Rebuild Times – 1TB Drive

Hours

XIV Other

30 minutes!(30-35 minutes is maximum on afull system)



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Rebuilds Take a Long Time

RAID 5: theory & realityhttp://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/raid-5-theory-reality/983

“A 2 TB drive might take 40 hours or more to restore.”



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Traditional RAID-5 (IBM, EMC, HDS) Rebuild

Data Data Data Data Data Data Data Spare

Data Data Data Data Data Data Data

X

X

Cache6 drives read… 1 drive writes



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XIV Disks Participating in “Rebuild” 179!

X

(168 for reads)

Technically, not a rebuild but rather a “re-gaining redundancy”)



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XIV Disks Drives 1-12

Drawers 1-15

Data is never duplicated inside the same drawer

180-12

168



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Typical Rebuild



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Smart “Rebuild” (regaining redundancy)



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Adding more Storage Capacity

Data is automatically rebalanced



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Managing StorageStorage Pool

Total Capacity

Consistency group



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Storage Pools – Regular and Thin Provisioning

256 pools maximum



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Creating Point in Time Copies (Snapshots)



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Restore From Point in Time Copies – Brand X



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Restore From Point in Time Copies – XIV



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XIV – Space Efficient Snaps



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IBM XIV Storage System GUI



Value of Redundancy

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IBM XIV Data Migration Feature

Migrates data from brand x boxes to XIV- One outage to connect the box- Then transparent migration of LUNs (can be thin-provisioned)- Tunable: 300GB/hr -> 1TB/hr

EMCHDS



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IBM XIV Data Migration Feature

One way transfer from brand x boxes to XIVThen two way communication with server- 512 LUNs from 4 different targets

EMCHDS



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The Problem

Long distance and low bandwidth



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The Solution - Offline Initialization

Tape Tape



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App

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Brand XStorage

Web Hosting on VMware, Brand X



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Web Hosting on VMware with XIV

App

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App

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App

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App

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App

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Thank You!


The End

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Session 1029Introduction to IBM XIV Storage System and What Makes It Unique

IBM® Edge2013 - Introduction to IBM XIV Storage System

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