QLogic 10000 Series Adapter Provides Application Benefits Through I_O Caching User Manual
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White Paper
QLogic 10000 Series Adapter Provides
Application Benefits Through I/O Caching
QLogic FabricCache Caching Technology
Delivers Scalable Performance to
Enterprise Applications
The QLogic 10000 Series delivers scalable performance to enterprise applications and reduces the performance gap between these applications and their storage subsystems.
KEY FINDINGS
The QLogic® FabricCache™ 10000 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapter enhances application performance by optimizing random read-intensive workloads running in clustered, shared resource environments. The QLogic 10000 Series technology integrates Fibre Channel storage network connections, a flash memory interface, and embedded processing. The technology delivers scalable performance to enterprise applications and reduces the performance gap between these applications and their storage subsystems.
QLogic’s caching technology in the 10000 Series Fibre Channel Adapter delivers:
•Large application acceleration with modest cache configurations:
–– In a single-server configuration, the adapter delivers 7.75 × the performance over having no cache
•Performance that scales directly with the server infrastructure:
–– In a multiserver (four or more) configuration, the adapter delivers up to 22 × the performance over having no cache
•Remotely located cache performance difference of less than 10 percent compared to cache residing locally
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The growing disparity between the performance of CPU-based and disk-based storage continues to grow. Applications that are Web 2.0, mission-critical, I/O intensive, virtualized, and clustered continue to put an additional burden on processors and slower storage, which lowers overall application performance. These increased performance demands on the enterprise data center require application performance improvements using innovative solutions that can scale across the enterprise infrastructure.
The QLogic 10000 Series Adapter technology delivers a unique solution optimized to address the growing performance gap between what the processor can compute and what the storage I/O subsystem can deliver. With a simple adapter deployment model, the seamless approach combines enterprise SAN connectivity with shared server-based I/O caching. The QLogic 10000 Series Adapter provides dramatic and scalable performance improvements to the widest range of enterprise applications.
This white paper provides an overview of the application performance capability of the QLogic 10000 Series Adapter. A query workload from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) Benchmark™ E (TPC-E) was used to generate database queries. TPC, an online transaction processing (OLTP) workload, provides real-world, I/O-
intensive transactions that simulate activities found in complex database application environments. The QLogic 10000 Series meets the application performance challenge and accelerates performance across the entire enterprise.
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QLogic 10000 Series Adapter Provides
Application Benefits Through I/O Caching
White Paper
PROBLEM AND RESOLUTION
Increased server performance, higher virtual machine (VM) density, advances in network bandwidth, and more demanding business application workloads create a critical I/O performance imbalance between servers, networks, and storage subsystems. Storage I/O is the primary performance bottleneck for most virtualized and data-intensive applications.
As application workloads and VM densities increase, so does the pressure on these potential hotspots and the time required to access critical application information. Slower storage response times result in lower application performance, lost productivity, more frequent service disruptions, reduced customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, a loss of competitive advantage.
A new class of server-side storage acceleration is the latest innovation in the market addressing this performance disparity. The idea is simple: fast, reliable, solid-state Flash memory connected to the server brings
faster data access to the server’s CPU. Flash memory is highly available in the market and promises to perform much faster than any rotational disk under typical small, highly random, I/O enterprise workloads.
The QLogic 10000 Series Fibre Channel Adapter from QLogic shows increased transaction throughput from 7 to 22 times with OLTP database workloads, while reducing application latency query (as measured
with TPC-E benchmarks). The 10000 Series Adapter is a PCIe-based I/O device that provides integrated storage network (Fibre Channel) connectivity, I/O caching technology, integrated flash memory, and the
embedded processing required to make management and caching tasks transparent to the host server. The QLogic solution delivers the application performance acceleration benefits of server-based cache without the limitations of solutions that require separate, server-based storage management software and operating system (OS) filter drivers.
The key benefits identified in this paper are the improvements by the QLogic 10000 Series Adapter on the overall OLTP performance in
transactions per second (TPS). These improvements provide real-world objective performance data to enterprise users. The primary objectives are to optimize performance, maximize transactions, and increase the value of the existing infrastructure, thereby reducing the costs of server, management, and overall infrastructure.
DATABASE WORKLOAD QUERIES WITH TPC-E
TPC-E, an OLTP workload, provides a mixture of read-only and updateintensive transactions that simulate the activities found in complex OLTP application environments. TPC-E queries were used without publishing any official TPC-E benchmark results. The queries exercises a wide range of system components associated with such environments, which are characterized by these attributes:
•Simultaneous execution of multiple transaction types that span a breadth of complexity
•Moderate system and application execution time
•A balanced mixture of disk I/O and processor usage
SINGLE-SERVER QLOGIC 10000 SERIES ADAPTER DELIVERS 7.75 × PERFORMANCE
The single-server test setup shown in Figure 1 was configured with an Intel® Xeon® Server connected to an HP® Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) storage array, through the QLogic 10000 Series Adapter and the QLogic 5800V/5802V Fibre Channel Switch. Benchmark Factory® for Databases TPC-E runs were executed with cache levels varying in size from 0 to 100 percent of the actual SQL database size.
Figure 1. Single-Server Database Query Setup
Figure 2 shows how performance improvements are directly related to caching the application data closer to the server processor. The range indicated by “1A” shows a significant application performance available with small configurations: 3 × TPS at just 20 percent cache size. The range indicated by “1B” shows a large application acceleration available with modest cache configurations: 7.75 × TPS at 30 percent cache size.
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