UNLEASHING APPLICATION PERFORMANCE WITH SOLID-STATE DRIVES AND SUN SERVERS White Paper March 2009

Abstract

This paper is intended for executives and managers and tells how Sun servers equipped with Flash-enabled solid-state drives (SSDs) offers dramatic improvements to HPC, Web 2.0, and data center application per- formance. In many environments today, high performance CPUs must wait while data is delivered from the storage subsystem — even the fastest hard disk drives are hundreds of times slower than modern servers. Sun servers equipped with SSDs can be configured to use fewer HDDs to deliver the same storage I/O performance, resulting in lower capital and operating expenses (CapEx and OpEx). 2 Unleashing Application Performance with SSDs and Sun Servers , Inc.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary...... 3

Computing Cost and Performance Challenges...... 5 Performance Bottlenecks...... 5 Power and Cooling...... 5 Increasing Complexity and Decreasing Reliability...... 6

SSDs Address the Need for Speed...... 7 Flash Economies...... 7 Fast, Predictable Performance...... 7 SSDs for Performance, HDDs for Capacity...... 8 Application Economics...... 8

Sun—Flashing the Data Center...... 10 More Application Performance...... 10 Reducing Footprint...... 10 Greener IT...... 11 Less Maintenance and Support...... 11 The Benefits of SSD-enabled Computing...... 11 Solaris ZFS—Optimized for SSDs...... 12

Flashing in the Right Direction...... 14 More Information...... 15 Try and Buy Offer...... 16 3 Executive Summary Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 1 Executive Summary

Figure 1: Even the fastest hard disk drives (HDDs) are much slower than today’s CPUs, holding back application performance.

Applications running on current multicore, multisocket servers are increasingly held back by storage systems that cannot keep up. While hard disk drives (HDDs) provide the capacity needed to handle large amounts of data, input/output (I/O) perfor- mance capabilities are relatively slow. Compared to server performance—driven largely by Moore’s Law—storage system I/O performance has increased by only a small fraction. Underutilized server processing power wastes time and decreases return on investment. Users are dealing with the disk to CPU speed discrepancy in one of three ways: • Suffering with less performance and productivity than they could have • Overbuying spindles to achieve I/O performance • Buying tons of costly RAM

Enterprise solid state drives (SSDs), or Flash drives, enhance I/O performance. SSDs are breaking down storage bottlenecks and creating substantial improvements in server utilization and application performance. In addition to performance gains, SSDs operate at much lower power and can lower maintenance and support costs. In the near term, they cannot provide the capacity needed at competitive price points.

The right approach combines the strengths of both HDDs and SSDs. Flash devices can be placed in a new storage hierarchy, called a Hybrid Storage Pools, to dramatically 4 Executive Summary Sun Microsystems, Inc.

increase storage performance by holding frequently accessed data. With the addi- tion of a Flash storage hierarchy, applications access the most used data at over 100 times faster when stored on a combination of enterprise SSDs and hard disk drives, resulting in greater application performance.

To help customers meet their growing enterprise, Web 2.0, and HPC application performance needs, Sun has fully integrated SSD/Flash technology into its new ™, ™ x64, and Sun CoolThreads™ servers. SSDs provide tremendous benefits for all operating systems available on these servers, and is optimized by the Solaris™ Operating System (OS).

Sun is first to market with software integration for performance optimization, and with SSD miniaturization through co-development of enterprise Flash technology with other industry leaders. Sun innovation and design results in solutions that save time and money for companies seeking to use technology to improve application performance and increase return on investment. SSDs help storage professionals who are looking for better ways to increase data center efficiency and accelerate I/O- intensive applications without straining already tight computing budgets. 5 Computing Cost and Performance Challenges Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 2 Computing Cost and Performance Challenges

In the current economy, reducing computing costs—both capital expenses (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx)—is a key initiative at every organization. Still, there are new demands and requirements for applications and services, and they face increasing cost and performance challenges.

Performance Bottlenecks Server CPU processing capabilities have steadily increased, roughly doubling in per- formance every 18-24 months. Unfortunately, the ability to get the data to the CPU has not kept pace. Disk I/O capabilities have increased only incrementally over the past decade (though storage capacity has kept up). The result? The bottleneck to ap- plication performance and server utilization is not typically the CPU, but more often storage I/O. In many application environments, servers wait while data is delivered from the disk to the CPU.

Figure 2: CPU performance has increased dramatically over the past several years, and hard disk drive (HDD) has not. To keep data flowing to increasing faster servers, more high-speed HDDs are needed.

Power and Cooling Adding more servers to roll out new applications can be difficult. Many data centers and computing operations are constrained by lack of space, power or cooling. Forty- one percent of Fortune 500 IT executives claim power/cooling as a major problem. Over 25 percent of IT budgets are consumed by costs of energy (power and cooling) and this percentage continues to rise. The cost of power and cooling is expected 6 Computing Cost and Performance Challenges Sun Microsystems, Inc.

to continue rising. Significant drivers of data center power and cooling usage are increasing storage requirements and more system memory.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states in its August 2007 report that the energy consumption of servers and data centers has doubled in the past five years and is expected to almost double again in the next five years, which translates into increased operating costs.

In many data processing environments, power and cooling at capacity. Running out of power at a data center can severely limit business agility.

Increasing Complexity and Decreasing Reliability Hard disk drives, which contain mechanical components that move with precision, ultimately wear out from wear and tear due to excessive heat and vibration. High- performance hard disk drives—required to deliver data in high-performance server architectures—spin at 15K RPM. This produces more heat and vibration, contribut- ing to more failures. RAID and failover architectures ensure data safety, but drive up deployment and RAS overhead costs.

Payroll is the largest data center cost, while power and cooling costs are the second- largest contributor to data center total cost of ownership (TCO)1. Installing more servers and storage only drives payroll costs higher.

1 Servers swamp data centers as chip vendors push ahead, www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/server/story/0,10801,108433,00.html 7 SSDs Address the Need for Speed Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 3 SSDs Address the Need for Speed

Continuing to roll out new applications in the same old way is no longer best. Solid state drives and flash technology represent breakthroughs in application perfor- mance and economics. Deploying new architectures with Flash technology can significantly reduce the number of servers and storage devices needed.

Modern servers are more powerful than ever. Cost-effective 4-socket systems that use multicore, multithreaded Xeon CPUs, such as the Sun Fire™ X4450 Server, are now available and can process data like never before. Average servers are fast approach- ing processing capabilities in excess of one million I/O operations per second (IOPS). However, mechanical disk drives have failed to keep up pace. Today’s fastest drives are only capable of 300-400 IOPS.

Figure 3: HDDs would need to spin at nearly 200,000 RPM to meet the breakthrough I/O performance capabilities of an SSD.

Flash Economies Makers of SSDs are benefiting from the high volume of Flash-enabled devices, from handheld media players to cell phones, digital cameras and removable USB drives. This has dramatically lowered the economics of Flash memory components to the point where it is economically viable to create enterprise versions as a strong storage alternative that can help rebalance system and storage I/O performance. 8 SSDs Address the Need for Speed Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Robust data integrity, reliability, and availability, combined with breakthrough per- formance and power characteristics, have made it possible to create a new class of storage device—Flash-based SSDs. With fast read and write performance, compelling price/performance points, and incredibly low power consumption, storage devices based on Flash memory are poised to revitalize the storage industry.

Table 1. Comparison of different technologies for storing data.

DRAM SSD HDD Budgetary costs $100/GB $37/GB $5/GB Reliability (MTBF in millions NA 2M 1.5M of hours) Power consumption/units 10.5W 2.5W 12W Random IOPS/units 1,000,000 IOPS up to 35,000 IOPS 350 IOPS Reaction time (latency) 90 nanoseconds 90 microseconds 10 milliseconds

Fast, Predictable Performance Keeping systems supplied with data is key to overall performance. Flash technology reads and writes data in microseconds, placing it between hard disk drives (mil- liseconds) and random access memory (nanoseconds) for access time. Flash SSDs have highly predictable performance compared to HDDs, which suffer from slow seek times and rotational latencies making data access times very variable.

As a result, data transfer throughput to and from solid state storage media is faster than mechanical disk drives can provide—with enterprise SSDs providing tens of thousands of IOPS compared to hundreds of IOPS for hard disk drives.

SSDs for Performance, HDDs for Capacity Mechanical disk drives are very cost-efficient for storing large capacities of data, with today’s prices approaching $2/GB (bare 15K drives). However, they are relatively slow, offering 300-400 IOPS, and expensive to operate, typically consuming 15-20 watts of power.

Solid state drives are fast (3,300 write IOPS and 35,000 read IOPS per drive) and con- sume little power (2.5 watts), but are expensive at $30/GB. While SSD performance and operating costs are appealing, clearly it is not cost-effective in every case to sub- stitute SSDs for mechanical drives in a storage array. Most industry analysts expect HDDs to be a cost-competitive storage component for years to come. 9 SSDs Address the Need for Speed Sun Microsystems, Inc.

At current prices, SSDs should be viewed not as a replacement for existing storage, but rather as a means to enhance it. Conventional storage systems mix DRAM and hard drives; SSDs are interesting because they fall in a cost and performance sweet spot between those two components. SSDs are significantly cheaper and denser than DRAM and also significantly faster than disk.

Until now, SAS and 15K rpm drives represented the dominant building block for high performance data storage—the only way to add more performance (IOPS) was to add more drives, whether or not more capacity was needed. With Sun’s ZFS™ Hybrid Storage Pool, storage architects can use the best balance of resources— SSDs, SAS, and SATA drives—to achieve the desired read and write performance and capacity, at the lowest cost.

Application Economics Many HPC and data center applications are licensed on a “per server” or “per CPU” basis. If these servers are constrained by data I/O—and therefore underutilized— more servers must be deployed to serve a given number of users. Along with this, more application licenses must be purchased.

When SSD-enabled servers increase application performance, fewer servers— and applications licenses—are required, lowering overall deployment costs. 10 Sun—Flashing the Data Center Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 4 Sun—Flashing the Data Center

SSDs will significantly change the way storage infrastructure is architected for the data center. Sun is first to market with software integration that significant increases performance and co-development of enterprise Flash technology that radically reduces the size of SSDs.

Working closely with Flash technology industry leaders, Sun is taking the lead on using SSDs in the systems and storage solutions to increase application performance, lower power and cooling costs, improve reliability, and reduce maintenance and administration costs. SSDs speed up storage and reduce I/O bottlenecks, enabling high-performance servers to increase utilization and workload capabilities while greatly reducing the requirement for high-performance HDD architectures (which require large quantities of HDDs per server). The result is an increase in return on assets, getting more—transactions, users, and throughput—from installed servers while lowering operating costs.

More Application Performance SSDs in Sun servers can instantly turbocharge application performance. For those applications that are I/O-bound or virtualized, such as Web 2.0, media, and HPC, Sun servers configured with SSDs offer significant performance enhancements. Preliminary benchmark testing show that databases, which power Web applications, can use SSDs to process more than 7x the number of transactions per second, and improve response time by more 65x2. This means for many application environments, Sun servers equipped with SSDs can support more users and deliver greater perfor- mance. Fewer servers mean fewer application licenses, saving even more.

Table 2. SSD-enabled servers can increase performance in many application environments.

Application Type Example Applications Database MySQL™, Oracle®, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase Web 2.0 Drupal, Alfresco HPC , Nastran, Abaqus, data analytics Media & Entertainment Audio and video media server Enterprise Sugar CRM, TIBCO, BEA, Greenplum

SSDs can improve application performance for both new and existing application deployments, in all operating system platforms: Solaris OS, , and Microsoft Windows Server.

2 http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/ 11 Sun—Flashing the Data Center Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Reducing Footprint Computing infrastructure deploying SSDs can also reduce floor space requirements in high-performance environments. Some I/O-intensive applications require hundreds of “short-stroked” 15K drives were needed to meet service level requirements and meet the I/O demands of high-performance servers. Servers with SSDs can now meet this performance (IOPS) requirement in much less space and cost, freeing up racks and power for other uses.

Greener IT Sun servers with SSDs can help conserve data center resources. Flash technology SSDs consume around one fifth of the power of both memory DIMMs and disk drives, and have lower cooling requirements making it “greener” than its alternatives. SSDs offer breakthrough capabilities—a dramatic reduction in power consumption and a significant speedup in storage performance.

Less Maintenance and Support In many ways, SSDs are a familiar system component to computer and data center operators. They have the same plug-and-play form factor and interface as traditional HDDs, and are hot swappable. However, unlike hard drives that use a motor to spin magnetic media and a read/write head that must move to perform operations, en- terprise SSDs contain no moving parts. Data is stored on integrated circuits that can withstand significant shock and vibration. In fact, enterprise SSDs operate in a wider thermal operating range and wider operational vibration range than hard disk drives, delivering significantly higher Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)—2.0 million hours (SSD) versus 1.5 million hours (HDDs). Simply put, SSD last longer, and in many appli- cations fewer are required. Fewer drives that last longer means data center operators spend less time diagnosing and replacing failed devices.

The Benefits of SSD-enabled Computing

Figure 4: SSDs can dramatically reduce CapEx and OpEx. A single SSD has the IOPS performance of 100 15K drives. 12 Sun—Flashing the Data Center Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A simplistic example that focuses on IOPS shows the benefits of SSDs. If an applica- tion environment needs 30TB of capacity and an aggregated throughput of 30,000 IOPS to meet service level agreements. A traditional approach would require 100 15K 300GB drives, each of which consume 12 watts and cost $550 each to deliver the IOPS needed. The total capacity is 30TB, the cost is $55,000 and they consume 1.2 kWh of electricity.

A better alternative to meeting these requirements is to use a single SSD ($1,000) to deliver the 30,000 IOPS required and use a smaller number of high-capacity SATA drives that cost much less than 15K rpm drives; the result is 30 1TB drives, at $600 each and consuming 13 watts to provide cost-effective HDD storage. The savings are dramatic: • Purchase cost is $18,000, a 67-percent savings • Electricity consumed is 0.392 kWh, a 66-percent savings

Solaris ZFS—Optimized for SSDs Solaris ZFS is ready to seamlessly take advantage of SSDs today. Unlike less sophisti- cated file systems, ZFS™ can recognize different media types and will optimize the file system to use SSDs as high-performance disks that improve read and write throughput.

Figure 5: Solaris ZFS is already optimized for SSDs, providing the capability to instantly increase performance and reliability. 13 Sun—Flashing the Data Center Sun Microsystems, Inc.

• Instant performance: The Solaris ZFS file system transparently and automati- cally places the most frequently read data into the storage read cache, which is a combination of system memory (DRAM) and SSD or HDD drives, instantly improv- ing the performance of most I/O-intensive applications. SSDs can be configured as a cache disk without dismounting a file system that is in use, and automatically optimizes the file system to use the SSDs as high-speed devices that improve read throughput for frequently accessed data. • High-speed write cache: For certain types of writes, the ZFS file system can greatly improve performance when using SSDs, and especially when using devices that are designed for this purpose (write-optimized SSDs). The Solaris ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) allows applications (such as databases) that demand synchronous writes to use SSDs and benefit from latency reductions, allowing the transaction to safely move on to the next operation while data is written to HDDs asynchronously in the background. For example, internal testing showed that Solaris ZFS wrote the ZIL to the SSD far faster than the milliseconds needed to access an HDD—acceler- ating application performance. • Solid reliability: The Solaris OS has a proven, mature Fault Management Archi- tecture (FMA). With sophisticated data integrity and correction algorithms, ZFS automatically detects and repairs bad data, providing for self-healing capabilities. One feature—data scrubbing—runs as low priority in background to verify data integrity of every block of data. In addition, an extensible set of agents can auto- matically take faulty components offline, and diagnostic messages link to Sun’s knowledge base which guide administrators through easy to understand correc- tive tasks when human intervention is required. 14 Flashing in the Right Direction Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 5 Flashing in the Right Direction

Today, SSDs can accelerate application performance and lower operating costs across the line of Sun servers, including CoolThreads™ chip multithreading (CMT), Sun Fire x64 servers, Sun Blade™ systems, Sun SPARC Enterprise®, and ™ carrier- grade servers. SSDs, based on Flash technology, are poised to help increase applica- tion performance and response time dramatically, while utilizing less floor space and energy at a fraction of the cost of hard disk drive storage. More reliability and higher server utilization means fewer servers, helping to lower system operator, service, and support costs. The net result is lower CapEx and OpEx.

As Flash technology continues to develop and gain in popularity, a variety of signifi- cant trends are expected. • Flash technology-based enterprise solid state device reliability is anticipated to exceed that of enterprise hard disk drives by twofold over the next two years. • As Flash technology makes its way into the storage infrastructure, the use of enterprise hard disk drives is likely to shift from a performance focus to providing massive capacity. • As Flash technology is deployed, applications can be automatically accelerated through hybrid storage pools in the Solaris ZFS file system, minimizing or elimi- nating the need for tuning—where to place data for maximum performance. Ultimately other operating systems will include such advancements and many performance sensitive applications will be redesigned with Flash technology ac- celeration embedded. • As more servers incorporate Flash technology—providing more capacity in Flash memory than DRAM—greater performance and power efficiencies can be realized. Understanding this, Sun intends to integrate Solaris ZFS, Flash memory, and new hardware and silicon innovations to deliver high-performance, low-power, general- purpose storage and server appliances that accelerate software that runs on Sun’s SPARC® processor-based or x64 platforms.

With an unwavering commitment to getting the best from technological innovation and open storage solutions, Sun continues to drive server technology forward. With the introduction of Flash technology and related hardware and software products, Sun helps enterprises increase application performance and lower costs.

Try and Buy Offer To gain firsthand knowledge of the benefits of SSD-enabled Sun servers and solutions, consider Sun’s risk-free try and buy program. Further details and an online application are available at sun.com/tryandbuy. 15 More Information Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 6 More Information

For additional information on how Sun servers equipped with SSDs can help unleash the performance of Web, HPC, and enterprise applications and reducing data center costs while increasing application performance, visit the Web sites in Table 3 below or contact a local Sun representative.

Table 3. Web links for additional information.

Web Site URL Description sun.com/flash Information about Flash—enabled solutions and technology sun.com/storage/openstorage/resources.jsp Information about Sun Open Storage solutions .org/os/community/storage/ Storage Community within the OpenSolaris Community Unleashing Application Performance with Solid-State Drives and Sun Servers Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA Phone 1-650-960-1300 or 1-800-555-9SUN (9786) Web sun.com © 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Sun Fire, Sun, ZFS, MySQL, Sun SPARC Enterprise, and Netra are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. Intel Xeon is a trademark or registered trademark of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. ORACLE is a registered trademark of . Information subject to change without notice. Printed in USA 03/09