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ATTO Technology ExpressNVMTM NVMe Smart Switch Host Adapters and Xinnor Software RAID (xiRAID)
Data integrity, system design flexibility, and storage resource management are key requirements when designing a scalable, high-performance storage solution.
Description of the problem
RAID is commonly used in compute-intensive and high-performance ecosystems. It is important for critical applications that include protection against disk failures, enabling data redundancy and fault tolerance to improve storage reliability and performance.
These features are fundamental to any enterprise and client system framework to ensure a robust and resilient infrastructure.
NVMe SSD devices are increasingly becoming the standard for delivering ultra-low latency and high-performance block storage in enterprise data centers.
For mission-critical applications, low latency is very important. Customers expect real-time, lag-free interaction with technology, and access to fast, high-capacity storage with limited downtime is extremely valuable in high-IOPS scenarios. Enterprises and data centers today require solid NVMe storage connectivity to deliver a best-in-class end-user experience.
Challenges
NVMe devices are not protected in any way, which introduces new challenges in terms of data integrity, management and scalability. Addressing these challenges that hinder the implementation of RAID on NVMe SSDs is of paramount importance.
Software RAID options are designed to work with slower, less parallel and I/O-intensive devices, such as SATA and SAS hard drives or solid-state drives.
When using NVMe storage, most software RAID products struggle with CPU load, memory utilization, and overall performance. This problem is exacerbated when rebuilding a RAID array in the event of a disk failure.
These drawbacks are one of the main reasons why, in many installations, customers must rely on simple mirroring or RAID 1+0 schemes to maintain high levels of performance and data protection.
However, this is expensive due to the need to double the required disk capacity.
Today's server platforms offer NVMe connectors, but they are usually connected to simple PCIe retimers to increase signal strength. This solves signal quality issues, but nothing more. In the storage world, an appropriate analogy would be SATA with 1:1 connections and simple SMART management.
Data-intensive and mission-critical applications require advanced scalability options similar to SAS expanders and extensive device health monitoring and performance analysis to effectively manage storage resources.
Solution
Xinnor xiRAID is a software RAID solution designed from the ground up with NVMe performance in mind. It provides a high level of flexibility while keeping host resource utilization at an unprecedented minimum.
When you're dealing with hundreds of thousands or millions of IOPs and tens of gigabytes per second of bandwidth, software RAID begins to consume significant amounts of host resources, which can drain business applications of CPU cycles.
“xiRAID is based on a relatively underused feature of modern x86 processors called AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) and has a lockless architecture that helps distribute computation evenly across the processor cores.”
This is a highly efficient approach that has taken years of research, but allows for on-the-fly RAID parity calculations for tens of millions of IOPS with negligible impact on host resources. It also enables faster RAID reconstruction in the event of disk failure, minimizing the window of increased risk of data loss and degraded performance.
ATTO ExpressNVMTM NVMe Smart Switch Host Adapters are an innovative storage connectivity solution that increases the scalability and flexibility of dense NVMe storage ecosystems while offering advanced management features not available in other NVMe adapters.
ExpressNVM is a PCIe Gen4.0 host adapter with dedicated connections for up to 16 NVMe SSDs to increase storage performance in your host server. ExpressNVM's intelligent hardware architecture is tightly coupled with highly optimized algorithms to deliver maximum throughput in the fastest, most reliable and intelligent way.
ExpressNVM is equipped with a range of management tools and administrative features that enable data centers and hyperscalers to design intelligent and flexible enterprise-class systems while maintaining the full performance of NVMe SSDs. The FPGA-based management engine in ExpressNVM monitors key metrics via SMBUS and translates them into highly actionable information in the software stack, ATTOView, which collects and analyzes metric data. IT managers and system administrators can now gain visibility into the NVMe ecosystem at a granular level.
ExpressNVM also offers UBM and Virtual SES features that extend device management via the backplane.
In addition to tracking temperature and firmware patches, metrics such as disk health, faulty device isolation and encapsulation, and disk read/write statistics add incredible value to the NVMe ecosystem – helping to reduce downtime and lower the overall TCO.
The performance of xiRAID software RAID and ExpressNVM's ability to scale, manage, and monitor NVMe disk arrays combine to create a cost-effective, high-performance storage solution unlike any other on the market.
It is a powerful yet highly flexible solution to the challenge of affordable, high-performance data protection and NVMe drive management in the data center.
Testing
We installed 8 NVMe SSDs via PCIe Gen4 on a Dell PowerEdge server using the ATTO ExpressNVM adapter and ran sequential I/O in a RAID group.
Sequential loads were measured using FIO with a 128K IO size. xiRAID recorded impressive RAID5 performance with reads clocked at 27.5 GB/s in the x4 PCIe configuration across the RAID group and writes averaging 9 GB/s.
Test Configuration:
Server: Dell Power Edge R750
CPU: Intel® Xeon® Gold 6330 CPU @2.00GHz
Memory: 128 GB DRAM
Operating System: Oracle Linux 8.7
Kernel Version: Linux 5.4.17-2136.313.6.el8uek.x86_64
NVMe Card: ExpressNVM S48F/S4FF x16PCIe Gen4
NVMe SSDs: 8x Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN650 NVMe RAID Level: RAID5
RAID Strip Size: 128K – with Xinnor Recommended Optimization Performance Benchmarking: FIO
Conclusions
Xinnor xiRAID and ATTO ExpressNVM bring the cost-effectiveness and functionality of traditional RAID to the NVMe storage ecosystem while delivering exceptional performance, reliability and scalability. xiRAID enables full-featured NVMe software RAID with minimal resource waste, while ExpressNVM provides the flexibility and manageability that storage infrastructure architects demand from their RAID designs.
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