Flash Ahead

IBM® FlashSystem™:
The World’s Fastest Storage

1 © 2015 IBM Corporation

 The world is flatter and smaller. Now it’s becoming smarter…
More interconnected, more instrumented and more intelligent

Purpose-built, workload-optimized systems that

redefine performance to deliver the highest
possible value with the least resources

We need Smarter Systems

for a Smarter Planet
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 Smarter infrastructure is key to Smarter Computing

Easy to deploy, operate and

Managed as a cloud
administer

Smarter
Computing
IT efficiency is essential to outpace
data growth

Designed for data Tuned to the task

IT must adapt to changing

information patterns and needs

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Top challenges for IT managers

Manage data growth

Manage costs and capacity growth
Manage server sprawl
Improve asset utilization
Increase ROI
Extend useful life
Consolidate when possible
Improve service levels Datacenter Green initiatives
Higher performance and productivity
Better reliability, availability and serviceability

With limited budgets, where should IT managers invest for the best overall return?

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 Target the bottleneck in the IT stack

In the past 10 years:

CPU speed performance increased ~8-10x
DRAM speed performance increased ~7-9x
Network speed performance increased ~100x
Bus speed performance increased ~20x
Disk speed performance increased ONLY 1.2x

Storage disk speed is the bottleneck that’s slowing everything else in the IT stack

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 Flash unlocks the storage bottleneck

Flash delivers performance and value to boost the critical applications

running your business

Extreme performance: Serve customers faster

MicoLatency™: Gain competitive advantage
Macro efficiency: Do more things at once
Low TCO: Save money and boost value
Enterprise reliability: Go the distance

Eliminate the storage-tier bottleneck and drive efficiency

across the entire data path!
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 Flash use cases

Consolidation End-user experience Price/performance

maximization economics attainment

Developer time Application Footprint

optimization scalability minimization

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 Flash benefits
Boost performance/efficiency without re-architecting applications or the
storage infrastructure

85%
85% reduction
reduction 90%
90% reduction
reduction 25-100
25-100 µsµs latency
latency 80%
80% reduction
reduction
in
in batch
batch processing
processing In
In OLTP
OLTP times
times for
for deterministic
deterministic In
In energy
energy usage
usage
times
times performance
performance

75% reduction Enterprise

in footprint reliability
Store one petabyte in High availability,
one floor tile, add 2D RAIDTM and
compression and add Variable Stripe
up to 100% more RAIDTM (VSR)

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 Compare flash performance / efficiency
Compare the capabilities of ½ a rack of flash to a traditional 15K drive implementation

Performance
 Flash can service up to 5.9M IOPS
 Disk requires over 98 racks of 15K RPM drives
 Nearly a 200:1 performance/capacity
advantage
Density
 Flash provides 500TB of usable capacity
 Disk requires almost 4.5 racks of 600GB drives
 Nearly a 9:1 capacity/rack space advantage

Environmental
 Flash uses <10 KVA
 Disk drives would consume ~6,000 KVA
 Nearly a 600:1 energy/IOPS advantage

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 Flash works now

• Supplement your existing infrastructure

• Assign flash the heaviest, most critical workload
• Decrease overall response times
• Increase efficiency/utilization across the IT stack

Remove the IO bottleneck! • Completely eliminate storage performance issues

So who’s using flash now? How has it helped their business?

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Business challenges
Handle high call volume to China from
the United States on Chinese New Year
Solution
Implement IBM’s flash to combine
performance, capacity, and reliability at
a competitive cost
iTalk achieved an instant 6x performance boost!
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iTalk celebrates the Year of the Rabbit with
a 6x flash performance boost
• With one easy change, we vastly improved
performance.
• It is by far the most successful, highest-impact piece of
hardware in our system.
• Probably the best investment of technical dollars that
we could have made!
Jeff Liegel, Chief Engineer, iTalk
 Mercury Technology boosts cloud performance
IBM’s flash achieved reliable acceleration for
Mercury’s Oracle cloud applications
Business challenges
Eliminate storage latency and • IBM is the only company that has such a long history in this
achieve the higher performance technology.
needed to accelerate Oracle cloud apps
• The other vendors are newer players, none of whom have
Solution been working in the Oracle world.
In-server flash offered dedicated
storage at microsecond latencies Brian Day, Vice President of Sales at Mercury Technology

IBM’s flash reduced Mercury Technology’s batch processing times from 5 hours to 1—
a 5x improvement with just one change in the storage tier!

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Business challenges
Extreme media streaming requirement
Solution
Implement a high-impact, nondisruptive
RamSan solution which was installed in a
single day
UFC knocks out production bottlenecks with
IBM flash
• Flash has just completely eliminated [bottlenecks].
Everything’s flowing smoothly.
Mike Saindon, Production Engineer
• Before we put the flash in, we couldn’t use our asset
management system to its maximum capacity and intent.
Christy King, Vice President of Digital, Technology and R&D

With flash, streaming batch jobs completed up to 70 percent faster and improved performance
and efficiency on other disk storage platforms by 40 percent!

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 Penn State slashes backup time by 80 percent
the TMS RamSan delivers vastly better IOPS
performance than two hundred 15K disk drives
Business challenges • We literally just turned it on and that’s
Accelerate nightly backups to all the performance tuning we did. It
meet windows just worked out of the box.

Solution • They’re very well made and a very

Implement flash instead of mature product.
adding 200 high performance Jason Holmes, Lead System Admin
disks

Flash instantly increased perfomance in nightly backups 6x

while reducing power consumption by 90 percent!

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 Banco Azteca integrates flash into its SAN for increased
performance in its credit processing business

Business challenges
Speed up application
processing without
architectural changes

Solution
Integrate flash seamlessly into
the existing infrastructure

Flash integrated seamlessly into a production SAN while delivering an order of

magnitude better response time!
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 What is flash exactly?
The fastest purpose-built flash storage device . . .
• Up to 20 usable TB in a 1U appliance
• Up to 500K IOPS capability @ 25-100 µs latencies
• Up to 4GB/s bandwidth
• 500 watts of power consumption
• 4 8GB FC or 4 40GB Infiniband connections

. . . Coupled with the most reliable, redundant design on the market

• Unique Variable Stripe RAID (VSR) protection on the module
• 2D RAID for system-wide data protection
• Highest oversubscription rate in the industry
• Used in “cannot fail” environments: military and satellites
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 Flash simply improves performance—now
Flash is a block data storage device that
delivers deterministic high performance (µs)
and enables customers to:

• Increase CPU (application) efficiency

• Decrease time to operation results
• Unlock scale of users or processes
• Provide the best end-user experience

…simply by reducing latency

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 Storage disk latency drives CPU utilization/efficiency lower
1. Issue I/O request (~ 100 μs)
2. Wait for I/O to be serviced (~ 5,000 μs)
3. Process I/O (~ 100 μs)
• Time to process 1 I/O request = 100 μs + 5,000 μs + 100 μs = 5,200 μs
• CPU utilization = Wait time / Processing time = 200 / 5,200 = ~4%

~100µs ~100µs
Processing

CPU state

~5000 µs
Waiting
Time
1 I/O request
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 Flash’s microlatency drives CPU utilization/efficiency higher
1. Issue I/O request (~ 100 μs)
2. Wait for I/O to be serviced (~ 200 μs)
3. Process I/O (~ 100 μs)
• Time to process 1 I/O request = 100 μs + 200 μs + 100 μs = 400 μs Speed application
• CPU utilization = Wait time / Processing time = 200 / 400 = ~50%
response up to 12x
simply by changing
~100µs ~100µs
Processing
storage latency!

CPU state

~200 µs
Waiting
Time
1 I/O request
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 The real cost of latency

In the financial sector, which relies on

ultra-low-latency networks to drive
low-risk, high-volume trading profits, a
1 millisecond (ms) advantage could be
worth upwards of $100 million a year

The world's biggest e-tailer estimates that

every millisecond delay to its online
service costs it $4.8 million in lost sales
Source: Richard Irving Capacity Magazine

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 Let the IBM® FlashSystem™ family help you
1. Collect some easy-to-gather performance information about
your environment
• Host: IOstat, perfmon, sar, and so on
• DB: Oracle AWR, DB2 db2support, and so on
• Storage: Symmetrix WLA, NAR files, and so on

2. Provide a free, detailed performance assessment that identifies the:

• DB components consuming time: CPU utilization, Top 5 foreground/background events,
and their impact on overall response time
• Predicted improvement in response times and CPU utilization with flash
• Recommendations for other tuning activities that could improve overall response times

3. Follow up with a 2-week trial to demonstrate the predicted performance

improvement with flash
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22 © 2015 IBM Corporation