Hyper ISE creates a new class of storage system focused on performance-driven applications. Hyper ISE is the only storage system with a True SHD architecture amalgamating SSD and HDD into a single pool of capacity. The XIO Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP) software identifies hotspot data and places it on SSD and keeps all other data on HDD. This results in the best price/performance/capacity ratios in the industry.
The Hyper ISE True SHD architecture ensures that the SSD resources are never wasted, performance is never compromised, and capacity is always cost effective.
Hyper ISE provides the ideal balance of four fundamental elements of storageprice, performance, capacity, and reliabilityto provide a unique solution to real-world problems in the data center. All four elements are inextricably bound together; balancing them leads to lower costs, improved reliability and data integrity, and increased application performance, changing the economics of IT and enabling users to do far more with their storage than ever before.
- Hyper ISE significantly improves database application performance transparently, enabling customers to avoid huge infrastructure investments. Query times are being reduced by up to 20 times.
- Hyper ISE enables virtual desktop implementations supporting thousands of virtual desktops in a single storage system, surpassing performance requirements, making virtual desktop environments work seamlessly and fitting well within budgetary constraints.
- Hyper ISE extends the consolidation benefits of server virtualization achieving up to 50:1 virtual-to- physical ratios.
- High performance cloud storage requires predictability in both performance and cost. While it is easy to determine capacity growth rates, traditional storage systems are unable to predict the price of performance. This creates a major risk that either impacts the cost of the service or does not provide the required performance back to the user. Hyper ISE uniquely solves this core issue, providing predictability in performance and cost.
Figure One: Hyper ISE Storage System
Hyper ISE achieves all of this with a 3U footprint and 14.4 terabytes of capacity reaching up to 200,000 IOPS. Additionally, Hyper ISE performance remains high throughout its entire lifecycle.
The Hyper ISE Advantage
Hyper ISE is a new class of storage system that balances price/performance/capacity and reliability. In order to understand how this is achieved, it is important to first understand how Hyper ISE was designed from the ground up. It is relatively easy to integrate SSD into a storage system: the hard part is using those drives effectively.
True SHD
Hyper ISE brings a new approach that creates a single tier of storage, using CADP software.1 CADP “fuses” SSD and HDD and places “hot” active data onto SSD. CADP performs an ROI calculation and will only place data onto SSD if the application will experience a real performance improvement.
“Warm” active data remains on HDD since not all active data requires SSD performance and placing it on these drives is costly and wasteful if no performance benefit is realized. Hyper ISE leverages its SSD to ensure the highest levels of efficiency and optimization at all times, creating the perfect partnership between SSD and HDD to provide cost effective high performance and provide sufficient capacity for application data.
Figure Two: Continuous Adaptive Data Placement
Fast Forever
One of the biggest issues with any storage system is sustaining performance over its entire lifetime. A storage system can start out really fast and then performance falls off a cliff. IT professionals find themselves spending hours trying to tune their systems to squeeze out better performance, often will very little success.
Most storage systems begin to hit a performance wall as data consumes up to 50-70% of its storage capacity. Hyper ISE, on the other hand, retains high performance throughout its entire lifecycle. One customer had to keep storage capacity at about 25% with their old storage systems in order to maintain optimal performance. That meant they had to acquire and manage four times the amount of storage capacity needed to store their data in order to provide the requisite application performance. Hyper ISE provides high performance even when capacity reaches 100% utilization.
With Hyper ISE, users will not “feel” drive failures, RAID rebuilds, data migrations, mirroring, or high levels of capacity utilization. These events are not often measured or discussed when referencing storage performance, yet they are common occurrences.
All of the design elements of Hyper ISE, including the way it handles vibration, heat dissipation, data placement, drive reliability, and the intelligence of CADP, result in sustainable and self-optimizing performance. Additionally, the disk drives within Hyper ISE are not treated as individual and disposable components, but rather as a single organism. As such, they work congruently resulting in higher performance and reliability.
Price/Performance/Capacity and Reliability
Enterprise customers have some of the fastest storage in the world, but they pay a high price to achieve high performance. For more IOPS, they add more disk drives and create wide stripes across them, increasing cost per IOPS and per gigabyte. Another alternative is to implement SSD as its price per IOPS may be attractive. Its price per gigabyte, however, is very high.
If performance is a requirement, a wide range of storage systems are immediately eliminated as options since they just can’t provide the levels of performance needed. At this point, it is necessary to remember that performance is impacted by a number of elements:
- Capacity Utilization: Most storage systems experience degraded performance as capacity is consumed.
- Mixed Workloads: Some storage systems perform well with certain workloads but falter when different applications with varying I/O behavior access them.
- Drive Failures and RAID Rebuilds: These common occurrences can slow performance significantly for many storage systems.
- Data Migrations and Mirroring: Moving and mirroring data often utilizes the same resources as user applications, slowing performance.
- Vibration and Heat: Two major issues that slow performance and impact reliability especially over time.
It is also essential to consider pricing and budgetary constraints. This also requires more than a superficial analysis, extending to considerations of pricing per IOPS or per gigabyte as well as all of the issues described above.
Reliability also plays a major role in these decisions. Though it is a priority for everyone, it is often overlooked in favor of price/performance and the cost of capacity. The reliability of Hyper ISE starts at the infrastructure level and therefore directly impacts price/performance/capacity.
Price, performance, capacity, and reliability are linked; Hyper ISE was designed to provide an ideal balance of all four over time and through its entire lifecycle. It is the harmony of these elements that makes Hyper ISE a performance-driven storage system that maintains high performance throughout its entire lifecycle.
Hyper ISE and X-Volume
X-Volume is host-based software that greatly improves the performance and scalability of multiple ISE LUNs. X- Volume enables you to create and manage large pools of virtualized storage to address customer needs for highly scalable, flexible and cost-effective storage environments.
X-Volume allows administrators to create large storage volumes by striping or concatenating LUNs across one or multiple ISE storage systems. X-Volume is capable of delivering massive scalability in the range of hundreds of terabytes and performance measured in millions of IOPS.
Figure Three: X-Volume and Hyper ISE
Application Acceleration/Business Enablement
Server performance eclipses storage performance. As a result, application performance is negatively affected. Since 1987 CPU performance has increased 2,000,000 times and disk performance a mere 11 times! The imbalance between servers and storage is only going to increase as processors continue to get faster and add more and more cores. Database applications, server virtualization, and VDI implementations are all impacted by the bottleneck created by traditional storage systems.
Hyper ISE significantly changes the economics of storage through an ideal balance of price, performance, capacity and reliability. This truly results in business enablement, freeing up capital to invest back into the organization. Database applications query times are reduced by up to 20 times, without expending enormous amounts of money, resources, or time. Virtualized server ratios can far exceed the average of 10:1 with the potential to achieve 50:1 or higher. VDI is the next frontier for virtualization, though it has staggered and stalled with storage as the bottleneck. Hyper ISE can get virtual desktop initiatives to be great successes.
Hyper ISE — Performance-Driven Storage with True SHD
Hyper ISE is a new class of storage with unique design elements and technology that manages major issues other storage systems don’t even come close to handling. Other performance-driven storage treats SSD as a panacea only considering performance and losing sight of the fact that price/performance is the more important value proposition. Additionally, most performance-driven storage systems lack active-active fail-over that modern data centers demand. This is unacceptable in mission-critical environments.
Hyper ISE provides a level of reliability that no other performance-driven storage system can claim, price/performance/capacity ratios that are second to none, and the right balance of price per IOPS and price per gigabyte. The combination of True SHD enabled by CADP hotspot-aware technology results in extreme performance in a single storage system. X-Volume provides greater levels of scalable performance with the ability to aggregate multiple Hyper ISE systems to achieve over a million IOPS.
The imbalance between server and storage performance will inevitably become greater and greater as CPUs continuously increase in speed while disk drives lag behind. Server virtualization, virtual desktops and the relentless growth of data combined with the need to use and analyze this information to drive the business, stresses the situation even further. One side of the data center (servers) is enabling a new era in IT and the other side (storage) is inhibiting it. However, SSD drives are not a panacea that will magically change all of this by their very existence, but rather they are a valuable component in an overall solution that considers not just performance but price, performance and capacity.
1. See the “Continuous Adaptive Data Placement” report for more information.
