ADS1000 Performance - Apeiron Data Systems

The Apeiron Data Fabric
70% Reduction in Server Footprint
90%+ CPU Performance Improvement
Fully Integrated NVMeTM Storage Networking
The ADS1000 from Apeiron Data Systems delivers
non-blocking native NVMe storage networking…
Apeiron’s NVMe over Ethernet (NoE) solution delivers multiPetabyte scale NVMe storage without the costs, latency and
complexity of externally switched solutions. Unprecedented
performance and density for any NVMe SSD device.
Yes, we can do that…
Apeiron Data Systems – Copyright © 2016
January 2016
Executive Summary
Introducing the ADS1000: Apeiron Data Systems is set to disrupt the storage industry with a newly
developed storage networking technology designed specifically for the Non Volatile Memory express
(NVMeTM) SSD market; “NVMe™ over Ethernet” (NoE). NoE was developed to provide a scalable and
robust storage platform for environments where both storage capacity and server performance are
required. The ADS1000 eliminates the server “sprawl” typically associated with scale-out architectures.
Thus eliminating the need to procure and manage server resources when only storage is needed. With
fully integrated 40GbE connectivity to thousands of NVMe SSD drives. The performance and scalability
testing documented in this paper confirms a 70% server consolidation, and a 95%+ increase in server CPU
efficiency over today’s Directly Attached Storage environments. Alternative scale-out architectures such
as RDMA networking require significantly more management and components such as Infiniband
switches, excess servers, management software, etc…The ADS1000 delivers unmatched efficiency and
performance, with the simplicity of Ethernet storage networking. Performance that is superior to
internal NVMe SSD drives. This is unlike any other storage solution on the market.
History: The migration from Hard Disk Drives (HDD’s) to Solid State Drives (SSD) has, up until now, been
supported by the performance and power efficiencies realized when the rotating media is removed from
the drive architecture. This preliminary leap in performance brought the ability to randomly read and
write at speeds many times the traditional HDD. Although the SSD hardware has delivered more
efficiency and performance, we still have a very long way to go before realizing the true potential. This
potential is now being realized through the elimination of legacy drive interfaces such as SAS and SATA.
These protocols were designed for HDD devices with rotating media and other performance limitations,
never considering the SSD efficiencies to come.
The market quickly realized that a more efficient and SSD optimized interface was required to unlock the
potential. That protocol is NVMe. Intel® Corporation and other providers have demonstrated a 4-6x
performance improvement based solely on the NVMe™ interface.
Apeiron Data Systems understood very early on in the NVMe development that the efficiencies and
performance would ensure widespread adoption, especially as Big Data and IoT deployments matured.
The ADS1000 was developed specifically to address the expense and inefficiency of growing scaleout/hyperconverged environments. Inefficiencies such as external switching infrastructure, server
sprawl, low CPU utilization and supplier-specific drive requirements would become a top concern of both
the business and the teams responsible for managing these complex deployments.
Summary: The ADS1000 is a completely new storage platform. Capable of delivering ultra-efficient high
speed networking to multiple NVMe SSD arrays. When compared to typical scale-out/hyperconverged
architectures, the ADS1000 provides a 95%+ CPU efficiency increase and a 70% consolidation. Apeiron’s
technology provides the ability to leverage the optimum SSD profile for your workload regardless of
NVMe supplier. This includes full support for Intel’s® next generation NVMe 3D XPointTM technologytoday. The ADS1000 is simply the most efficient solution for any scale-out environment both today and
in to the future.
Apeiron Data Systems – Copyright © 2016
All brand names are registered trademarks and property of their respective owners.
“3D XPoint is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries”
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January 2016
Apeiron Data Fabric Highlights
Open Architecture Provides Unmatched NVMe™ Flexibility, Protection and
Performance:

Standard 2.5” NVMe™ SSD drives from multiple suppliers ensure that price to
performance decisions are based upon technical and business drivers, not proprietary
supplier restrictions. With the ADS1000 your business is ready for current and future
NVMe options

Fully integrated, non-blocking 40Gb Ethernet switched storage fabric: The drive
enclosure and ADS1000 are fully integrated in a single 2U component, providing 32-ports
of connectivity without the acquisition, management and latency of external InfiniBand
switches

Fabric can scale from four (4) NVMe drives to thousands with zero performance
degradation, made possible by the non-blocking NoE technology
The native NVMe™ Ethernet fabric results in significant consolidation and
increased server efficiency:

Applications on any connected server can access any drive in the NoE fabric. When scaleout architectures are needed, the ADS1000 delivers 100% independent storage and
servers for maximum efficiency. Now you can deploy servers only when compute is
needed, not when only storage capacity is needed

Apeiron is compatible with any NVMe SSD, which includes 3D XPoint™ technology from
Intel®. Intel’s 3D XPoint technology is the first new memory design in over 40 years,
projected to have unmatched performance and reliability. Apeiron is ready now to
leverage this technology for your business (Apeiron will be releasing 3D XPoint
performance testing)
Integrated switching and storage, with “hardware assist”. The ADS1000 provides
unmatched performance and can process many of the traditional storage
operations directly on the NoE components. This eliminates the CPU and external
switching and storage processing typically associated with many scale-out
architectures:

Apeiron has developed an Ethernet based storage network with all the robustness of
Layer-3, but none of the latency and processing overhead. Leveraging a “hardened”
Layer-2 protocol, read and write performance is better than internal SSD’s, with full data
integrity assured. The NoE architecture is so efficient, the NVMe SSD itself is now the
bottleneck
Apeiron delivers all of the performance and simplicity of Directly Attached
Storage, with the efficiency and cost advantages only possible with storage
networking. All at better than internal SSD performance
iServers
are standard Intel® Haswell® E-5, dual processor, with 64GB cache per processor installed
enclosure houses 24 standard NVMe drives, and an integrated 32-port, 40GbE switched fabric
iiADS1000
Apeiron Data Systems – Copyright © 2016
All brand names are registered trademarks and property of their respective owners.
“3D XPoint is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries”
2
January 2016
Apeiron Data Fabric
Alternative scale-out architectures create an imbalance between compute and storage resources as data begins to
grow. This disparity between compute and storage inevitably results in an abundance of unused processing power.
CPU utilization levels can fall well below 30% in many environments, increasing costs when scaling only storage is
needed. NVMeTM provides the ability to address storage at a rate that is 4-6 times faster, simply based on the
efficiency of the interface. Users are beginning to demand the ability to dynamically provision storage and server
resources independently; to correct the imbalance inherent in today’s scale-out architectures. Emerging NVMe
based technologies such as Intel’s 3D XPoint™ technology will result in even more scrutiny being placed upon the
disproportionate allocation of these resources.
In the following sections we demonstrate the performance capabilities of the Apeiron ADS1000 solution, using the
I/O benchmarking tool FIO i .
0F0 F
ADS1000 Single Drive Performance vs. Internal NVMe SSD
The non-blocking performance of the ADS1000 is documented in the analysis below. The comparison of the
ADS1000 networked NVMe SSD ii versus the internally connected NVMe SSD demonstrates the fact that
performance (IOPS and Latency) is indistinguishable. In summary, the ADS1000 provides fully networked NVMe
performance which is equal to or better than captive SSD storage:
1 F1 F
Random Read, 4kB
Apeiron Data Systems – Copyright © 2016
All brand names are registered trademarks and property of their respective owners.
“3D XPoint is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries”
Sequential Write, 4kB
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January 2016
Up to 150% more performance per server
With the non-blocking efficiency of the Apeiron solution, the server is now able to utilize the full potential of the
NVMe storage. Apeiron’s architecture has moved the bottleneck to the SSD drive itself by managing the storage
functions within the HBA and IOM components. Offloading these functions to Apeiron means that far fewer servers
are required for a given workload. For scale-out environments, external storage can now be dynamically and
independently allocated based on the applications’ requirements.
The data below documents how the storage performance of a single Intel® 1U server iii can be increased by 150%,
solely based on the efficiency of the ADS architecture (data documents two different SSD suppliers).
2F2F
A New Level of Performance from External Persistent Storage: 2.5M IOPS, Single 1U Server
With the ADS1000, it is now possible to improve the performance of
a standard 1U serveriii to over 2.5 Million 4kB IOPS.
Apeiron Data Systems – Copyright © 2016
All brand names are registered trademarks and property of their respective owners.
“3D XPoint is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries”
4
January 2016
Apeiron Application Cluster Overview
Apeiron’s distributed storage architecture enables a complete storage platform creating the industry’s best
performance density application clusters. The combined ADS1000 and the ADS40G HBA enable the Apeiron Data
Fabric capabilities.
The ADS1000 enables any host to access any storage within the Apeiron Data Fabric. Apeiron delivers 100%
independent scaling of storage and compute. The storage processing is done in the application compute node.
Storage is virtualized at the block level interface and embedded software manages the physical mapping via policy
based user configurations. Software support is provided for OpenStack/Cinder, along with other common
orchestration software and datacenter management tools.
Apeiron Data Systems – Copyright © 2016
All brand names are registered trademarks and property of their respective owners.
“3D XPoint is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries”
5
January 2016
ADS1000 Cluster Scalability
Single server performance data is provided to demonstrate the non-blocking architecture of the ADS1000 Data
Storage Fabric. The system provides a high performance server and storage data fabric without the latency, cost
and complexity of external switching. The benefits are truly evident when we begin to scale the Apeiron
environment. The ADS1000 performance testing documented below validates the ability to scale in a perfectly
linear manner, while simultaneously delivering the efficiencies of storage networking.
Testing the same system profiled above, the ADS1000 solution scales performance linearly to multiple racks, unlike
today’s hyper-converged architectures.
ADS1000 Linear Scaling to 75M+/120M+ IOPS per Rack
The Apeiron Data Fabric scales linearly to multiple PB’s iv, and
provides significantly improved server and storage performance.
The unique ability to leverage multiple NVMe drive suppliers and
technologies ensures the business and technical needs are met
today and in to the future.
3F3F
Apeiron Data Systems – Copyright © 2016
All brand names are registered trademarks and property of their respective owners.
“3D XPoint is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries”
6
January 2016
Summary
The Apeiron ADS1000 solution brings a new level of performance, flexibility and density to the market.
Scaling high performance NVMe™ SSD drives to multiple Petabytes, while leveraging all of the benefits of
a shared storage infrastructure. The ability to independently scale compute and storage with any
commercial NVMe™ drive provides protection from the procurement and support problems proprietary
SSD formats can create. The ADS1000 supports any standard NVMe™ device, including next generation
Intel 3D XPoint™ technology.
The Apeiron Data Fabric makes it possible to scale NVMe drives to meet the highest performance
workloads, and consistently achieve predictable, sub 100µS response times for millions of IOPS.
Using a lightweight protocol, virtualization technology and the power of FPGA processors, storage
functions and processing now have a hardware accelerated network, optimized for NVMe. Apeiron has
achieved new levels of performance for the next generation of storage networking, capable of truly
leveraging the efficiency and benefits of NVMe™.
NoE is simply the most efficient and lowest cost solution for high performance NVMe™ storage
networking. Apeiron has completely changed the scale-out game by delivering a fully networked storage
solution, with the simplicity and performance of internal storage devices. The ADS1000 is ready today for
any NVMe SSD, including the new ultra-high performance 3D XPointTM technology from Intel®
Corporation. The ADS1000 is the world’s only Ethernet based storage networking solution for the NVMe
SSD market. Compatibility with any NVMe drive capacity and supplier ensures your investment is both
optimized and protected. Unmatched performance and scalability is truly the best of both worlds, and
you can have it today.
Yes, We Can Do That
Apeiron Data Systems, Inc.
81 Blue Ravine Rd. ste.110
Folsom, CA 95630
916-834-1399
@Apeiron_DS_Inc
Apeiron Data Systems
Apeiron Data Systems
More info at: www.apeirondata.com
i
Flexible IO tester (fio) benchmarking/workload simulation tool, Jens Axboe: http://git.kernel.dk/?p=fio.git;a=summary
Bandwidth & IOPS measured when using a standard 2.5” NVMe SSD drive (Intel P3700 1.6TB)
iii Server example is a 1U, Dual socket Intel Haswell-EP Xeon processors (2.3GHz, 14 CORE, 64GB/proc)
iv Server example is a 2U, 4 node server with Dual socket Intel Haswell-EP Xeon processors (2.3GHz, 14 CORE, 64GB/proc)
ii
Apeiron Data Systems – Copyright © 2016
All brand names are registered trademarks and property of their respective owners.
“3D XPoint is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries”
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