This blog is a high level overview of some extensive testing conducted on the EMC (CLARiiON) CX3-80 with 15K RPM FC (fibre channel disk) and the EMC (CLARiiON) CX4-120 with EFD (Enterprise Flash Drives) formerly know as SSD (solid state disk).

Figure 1:  CX4-120 with EFD test configuration.

Figure 2:  CX3-80 with 15K RPM FC rest configuration.

Figure 3:  IOPs Comparison

Figure 4:  Response Time

Figure 5:  IOPs Per Drive

Notice that the CX3-80 15K FC drives are servicing ~ 250 IOPs per drive, this exceeds 180 IOPs per drive (the theoretical maximum for a 15K FC drive is 180 IOPs) this is due to write caching.  Note that cache is disabled for the CX4-120 EFD tests, this is important because high write I/O load can cause something known as a force cache flushes which can dramatically impact the overall performance of the array.  Because cache is disabled on EFD LUNs forced cache flushes are not a concern.

Table below provides a summary of the test configuration and findings:

In summary, EFD is a game changing technology.  There is no doubt that for small block random read and write workloads (i.e. – Exchange, MS SQL, Oracle, etc…) EFD dramatically improves performance and reduces the risk of performance issues.

This post is intended to be an overview of the exhaustive testing that was performed.  I have results with a wide range of transfer sizes beyond the 2k and 4k results shown in this posts, I also have Jetstress results.  If you are interested in data that you don’t see in this post please Email me a rbocchinfuso@gmail.com.

In the interest of benchmarking de-duplication rates with databases I created a process to build a test database, load test records, dump the database and perform a de-dupe backup using EMC Avamar on the dump files.  The process I used is depicted in the flowchart below.

1.  Create a DB named testDB
2.  Create 5 DB dump target files – testDB_backup(1-5)
3.  Run the test which inserts 1000 random rows consisting of 5 random fields for each row.  Once the first insert is completed a dump is performed to testDB_backup1.  Once the dump is complete a de-dupe backup process is performed on the dump file.  This process is repeated 4 more times each time adding an additional 1000 rows to the database and dumping to a new testDB_backup (NOTE:  this dump includes existing DB records and the newly inserted rows) file and performing the de-dupe backup process.

Once the backup is completed a statistics file is generated showing the de-duplication (or commonality) ratios.  The output from this test is as follows:

You can see that each iteration of the backup shows an increase in the data set size with increasing commonality and de-dupe rations.  This test shows that with 100% random database data using a DB dump and de-dupe backup strategy can be a good solution for DB backup and archiving.

I just completed a fairly comprehensive EMC CLARiiON AX demo video. The demo video is available on YouTube and I am also hosting a high quality video here.

EMC CLARiiON AX Demo