All-Flash is a race car for business or money to burn?

Why at once All-Flash?

Vladimir Belyaevsky, business development manager of Jet Infosystems company

The market forces business to change constantly, offering all new and new services. All try to be the most useful to the client, to know about each his requirement still before he learns about it. This goal is achieved by the most complete integration of all IT systems with business and with each other.

Requirements to information technologies become more tough: selecting for them some budget, the company expects to receive a certain information service. In particular, she is interested to obtain the most up-to-date information here and now quickly to answer market demands, to create new services and to bring them to the client. Often it is connected with need to take particles of useful data from a huge number of data, without interrupting at the same time normal operating activities.

Upon, except service, business receives a lot of restrictions: advanced queries cannot be started, reports are under construction inadmissibly long, there are not enough selected windows for technology works. All this results in impossibility to form deep and difficult analytics, to see a business picture in real time, to quickly deploy the services. The situation when IT dictate to business how and when to work, and not vice versa, disturbs our customers for a long time.

In such situation of All-Flash of the solution really bring notable benefit. They allow to receive a combination of high performance (from 100K IOPS to several million) and extremely low delay (less than 1 ms) practically on any number of data. It allows IT to cease to worry about a lack of performance and to focus on business challenges.

Practical application and results

The flash drives is one of bright examples of work the project which we implemented for telecom operator. When translating of 9 high-loaded databases of a system of billing on All-Flash the array to us was succeeded to increase twice performance, and by 8 times to reduce a delay of data access. It, in turn, by 4 times reduced a closing time of accounting day. Technology time for reservation process was also cut almost by half. Besides, implementation of new functionality – system power enough for deeper analytics, more frequent requests and changes became simpler. Business had performance stock, an opportunity to develop the services and not to worry about DWH.

If to speak, for example, about banking sector, then here the number of data is traditionally small (in comparison with IT and media companies, such as "Yandex" or STS), but their value is incredibly high. Data loss or access to them and also delays and decline in production lead to losses of profit at once. The ABS, CRM database, analytics and scoring – examples of critical business systems. For them customers require to provide at any cost the high level of performance and the minimum response time. The traditional systems on mechanical disks are not capable to provide necessary "density" of performance (the number of IOPS on 1 GB) therefore it is necessary to buy excess number of disks, as much as possible to unload a system and to approach carefully "attaching" of new functionality. SSD drives are deprived of this shortcoming and are capable to provide the high performance and a midget delay even on a small amount of data. In an example which I described earlier we transferred a system from 700 disks on 21 flash module. And it with performance improvement!

One of our customers (the bank entering a top 10) faced problems when entering new functionality into the CRM solution. This process represented the serious procedure with the backup of all system, recovery of the copy in prod-like to a system approved dauntaymy (at least for 2 hours for installation and testing of updating). Naturally, this preparation influenced performance of a productive system. If during implementation of functionality there was a failure, then there were even enough 4 hours not always for resumption of work as recovery from the backup copy was required. For the solution of this problem we implemented All-Flash the solution with functionality of "thin" clones that allowed to make the complete copy of a productive system in a second and to develop from it prod-like. Besides, processes of backup, recovery and installation of updates significantly accelerated. Required dauntaym now it is less than 1 hour – it time is necessary for updating testing. The cloning and system recovery occur in seconds, thanks to instant pictures, and it does not influence performance a solution flash.

The special case represents VDI. The appeal of hundreds of virtual machines to the same resource forms so-called effect of "blender". It consists in substantial increase of accidental input-output operations to a small piece of data. A large number of the Russian VDI projects of the first wave failed or demanded completions just because of disk arrays which were not able to provide required performance. It led to slow operation of applications and discontent of end users. A flash drives, due to the lack of moving parts, quite well cope with similar loading.

Assessment of performance of VDI (from the report of HPE Survey Report: Flash Insights and Revelations From 1.000 Storage Users, April, 2016)

Now we test several VDI solutions for All-Flash at our customers. Results are more than satisfactory: at the set volumes 20‒40 IOPS on the virtual machine with a response less than 2 ms easily are reached.

Solid state drives ‒ question economy

It seems that All-Flash – it is very expensive. Actually there is a number of technologies which significantly reduce the total cost of data storage. First, the scheme of storage used by big customers assumes existence of a set of copies of data (for productive operation, backup, creation of reports, tests and development). Such approach is caused by problems with performance. All-Flash of the solution allow to have one copy of data and using instant pictures or "thin" clones to receive the necessary number of copies for any purposes. All this minimum affects performance, but helps to release storage space considerably.

Secondly, in All-Flash technologies of saving of the place (deduplication and compression) are applied. On mechanical disks they led to serious degradation of performance because of transformation of consecutive loading into accidental. However a solution flash are insensitive to such changes and allow to save on the capacity (up to 2‒13 times) really well. Especially it is noticeable on examples of big databases, virtualization, VDI. To some of our customers application of All-Flash cost cheaper, than use of mechanical disks. So, in a case with VDI it is about a large number of very similar objects (virtual machines) therefore reduction of amount of data can be essential. On real these customers we received deduplication coefficient up to 13:1

Average coefficient of economy of space of storage on types of DWH (from the report of HPE Survey Report: Flash Insights and Revelations From 1.000 Storage Users, April, 2016)

"It is not necessary to hurry" (c)

Of course All-Flash is not the silver bullet designed to solve any problems of the customer. For example, slow operation of application can be caused by inefficient database requests, the wrong logic of creation of an information system. Besides, implementation a flash system senselessly at the insufficient power of server or network framework. All this is capable to reduce to zero benefit from All-Flash application. For this reason before starting similar projects, we book technical audit of IT infrastructure and applied landscape, we establish the existing problems, their reasons and methods of elimination. But a main goal of such inspections – the answer to a question: "What results (technical and economic) future project will give to business of the customer?".

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