RAID Rebuild Performance Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage Array

Monday Nov 10, 2008

The Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage Array can rebuild RAID sets in less than an hour at 100% disk capacity, which is much faster than competitive offerings.

The Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage Array minimizes rebuild time when recovering from replacing a drive and any other interruption than may cause RAID sets to rebuild. With the technology breaking use of ZFS to manage the file systems, rebuild times are some of the fastest in the industry.

Hard disk capacities are rapidly increasing and so are RAID rebuild times. Many storage administrators are using fewer and fewer drives in an array groups.

At 10% total capacity used the Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage Array rebuilds RAID sets in only 6 minutes if your total capacity is at 10% used.

At 100% total capacity used the Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage Array rebuilds RAID sets in 54 minutes.

The Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage Array rebuilds 5x faster than EMC and NetApp.

The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array with SATA drives can rebuild more than 2x faster than EMC or NetApp.

For the test presented, the rebuild process was fairly linear with capacity used.

Competitive Landscape

Rebuild times for 500GB SATA, 80% full Rebuild Time - Idle System No load
Storage	Time	Data Protection
EMC CX3-40	5 hrs 1 min	RAID 5
NetApp FAS3050c	4 hrs 53 mins	RAID 4
Pillar Axiom 500	3 hrs 48 mins	RAID 5
SS7210	2 hrs 8 mins	RAID Z
SS7110 (SAS, 146GB, 100% full)	54 mins	Mirroring

Benchmark Description

In this test, a Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage Array was populated with over 3 million files (each file was 150k). Then one of the drives was pulled and the rebuild was timed.

See Also

• Demartek Rebuild Comparison Site
• Demartek Rebuild Comparison White Paper
• vdbench SourceForge site

Disclosure Statement:

Sun Microsystem generated RAID rebuild results. Results reported 11/10/08.

Results Summary (Results are based on disk access performance with client caches enabled).

% Disk Capacity Used	Protect Level	Time (minutes)
10	Mirroring	6
100	Mirroring	54
5	RAIDZ	8

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Posted at 08:33AM Nov 10, 2008 in Benchmark Issues
Tags: dtrace performance sunstorage7000

Wowza Media Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array

Monday Nov 10, 2008

Wowza Media Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array NAS Streaming at more than 735 MB/sec!

The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array (SS7210) provides high performance with industry-leading price-performance for Video on Demand applications. The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array can support up to 5,880 users for 1 Mbits/s (Mb/s) streaming video files.

Results Summary

For more on the product see: www.sun.com/unifiedstorage

SS7210 also provides a very easy-to-use Web-based utility for analyzing the system performance. Managing NAS storage, analyzing performance, and configuration issues can be done with a simple and very powerful web-based interface. The user can customize a worksheet, add/remove performance real-time statistics, and export the data to external csv files for records and analysis.

Performance is easy to get simply out-of-the-box. The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array in striped configuration can stream more than 735 MB/sec (mirrored 752 MB/sec) video to deliver 5,880 videos randomly selected from 54,000 1 Mb/s streaming rate video files (in FLV format).

• This steaming rate of 735 MB/sec is the equivalent to a single layer DVD (4.7GB) in 6.4 seconds.
• The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array can store 91,500 hours of 1 Mb/s streams using a striped configuration.
• The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array can hold 43,775 hours of 1 Mb/s videos.
• 1 TB of data can be streamed in less than 23 minutes at 735 MB/sec.

Key Technical Points

Ease of Management with the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System

The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is the first open storage appliance that radically simplifies the way you manage your data that makes it easy to analyze and optimize your storage system.

It uses simple to use graphical tools and SolarisTM DTrace analytics software provide real time visibility throughout the entire data path. The browser interface provides an intuitive environment for administration tasks, visualizing concepts and analyzing performance data.

DTrace analytics capabilities include real time statistical graphs to help locate and isolate problems, and optimize storage performance and capacity utilization. DTrace provides pervasive observability to accelerate application development and optimization of Apache/MySQL/PHP (AMP) and MySQL/Apache/Ruby/Solaris (MARS) stacks.

Benchmark Description

Video Streaming Process

There are two different types of video delivery, Video On Demand (VOD) and Real Time Broadcasting. Video on demand can be delivered via file download or streaming. The size of a high-quality 1-hour 1 Mb/s video is 450 MB. Typical internet video streams are delivered at 300 Kb/s.

Each edge node of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) requires large amounts of storage. Real-time broadcasting does not require local storage, but recording and rebroadcasting is a very common practice (which do have large storage requirements).

The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array is well suited to be used as an edge node for video on demand purposes.

Twenty-six Wowza Media Servers and SS7210 are set up as an edge node for video streaming. SS7210 is populated with 54,000 videos, each video is a 1Mb/s stream in FLV format. The test uses 26 load generators to simulate 5,880 concurrent streaming sessions. Each session mimics a player that randomly selects a video out of the 54,000 videos, plays the video delivered by one of the media servers for 45 minutes, stops playing and repeats the same scenario.

Disclosure Statement:

Sun Microsystem generated results of typical Video on Demand requirements. Results reported 10/7/08 using solutions from www.wowzamedia.com.

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Posted at 07:26AM Nov 10, 2008 in Benchmark Issues
Tags: dtrace opensource performance sunstorage7000