The OceanStor 5000 V5 Series Hybrid Flash Storage is a reliable, efficient dataService system for enterprise applications. But to get the most from Huawei’s enterprise solution, proper configuration is required.
CONFIGURATION
In OceanStor V5, there are 3 types of LUN: Thick LUN, thin LUN, and ROW LUN.
In the case of the Thick LUN, all capacity is allocated all the while creating the LUN.
In the case of the Thin LUN, space is only allocated when writing.
In the case of the ROW LUN, there is a deduplication and compression of the LUN.
The write process itself is pretty simple and follows the flow demonstrated in the diagram above. The extent of the allocation unit determines the logic and the mapping of the physical address. In the case of the think LUN, the data is always written to the corresponding extent which HAS been allocated while creating it. This results in a considerably improved overall performance – one that enterprises will surely benefit from.
In the case of the thin LUN, a grain represents the basic allocation unit that comes from extent. That means that the writing of the data may result in grain/extent allocation. As allocation is based on the writing process itself, the distribution of the same data on the disk may not be continuous. At the same time, the thin LUN has an UNMAP feature to free up space, so writing will also lead to reallocating space. This has significant benefits for enterprises that value their storage space and want to optimize it. However, keep in mind that data reallocation is based on a specific command like unmap, which is not executed frequently. Overall, this makes the performance of the Thin LUN slightly worse than the Thick LUN by 10%.
In the case of the ROW LUN, the deduplication determines that data with different logical address will correspond to the same physical address. The compression determines that the physical space is smaller than the logical space. So the IO mechanism for the existing LUN isn’t suitable for the ROW LUN.
DEDUPLICATION AND COMPRESSION
The OceanStor V3&V5 reuses the file system’s IO mechanism to achieve deduplication and compression.
The OceanStor V3&V5 file system adopts the ROW write mechanism. For this reason, every write will result in allocating space/extent, so the metadata change is regular. The fragmented layout which stems from the regular allocation and release is serious. At the same time, the file system write mechanism takes into account the organization of the file system and should write on a transaction-by-transaction basis. This results in a decline in performance. NetApp storage has the same issue so that the SAN performance is not as good as NAS.
OceanStor V5 is mainly designed for traditional hybrid storage. To increase the performance with SAS and NLSAS disks, a large amount of cache is reserved to read cache. So the fingerprints in cache are a few and others have to be stored in disks. To achieve a high deduplication ratio, it must read the fingerprint on the disk, which will also increate latency. The high-performance read and write functionality of OceanStor V5 comes from using Huawei’s InfoTurbo dynamic storage-tiering technology — achieving a throughput of up to 3.84 GB/s per node and terabyte-level across the entire system.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The high-performance read and write functionality and combined namespace allows for the unified management of all hardware and software resources in the system, minimizing system management and maintenance complexity.
This allows enterprises to improve storage efficiency, simplify their workload and migration processes, and scale out as their unstructured data grows with Huawei’s OceanStor 9000 V5 scale-out NAS system. The unified and simplified management component of all hardware and software resources in the system is achieved via a global namespace that eliminates data silos caused by multiple namespaces.
OceanStor 9000 V5’s strength is in storing massive unstructured data. It achieves this by employing a fully symmetric distributed architecture that delivers superior performance and extensive scale-out capabilities across a super-large single file system.
Huawei’s OceanStor storage solution is favored by large-scale enterprises as it has the capacity and functionality to allow them to build custom cloud platforms with resource pooling, service automation, and intelligent management. Such an all-in-one approach is ideal for digital content production, storage and distribution anytime and anywhere.
