Hello,

I have uploaded a new file to developer works. This was part of a so called performance workshop we did for one of our customers.
(If you are interested in BVQ or need help for an analysis with BVQ then please send a note to bvq@sva.de We offer this product or service around this product world wide)

File:
Foil Set for this blog entry

One of the questions was about the performance of the underlying storage infrastructure.
In this case it was a DS5300 with plenty of 15k drives. So a plenty of performance you can get out of this.

We did a lot of analyses but the key foils showed that the customer will never be able to exhaust the DS5300 with 15k Arrays.

We also have been asked for a recommendation because the customer wants to migrate into a SVC split mirror now and for this he has to double the storage space.

We came to the following

First - don’t buy any more 15 k drives because you have enough high performing storage for both sides.

Option 1 - Three Tiers
2.5% highest performance 15k drives – reuse 15 drives in both locations
14% midrange performance with 10k drives
62% SATA 1TB 7k class

Option 2 – Two tiers with SSD and Easy Tier
38% midrange performance with 10k drives with SSD and Easy Tier to cover hotspots from the high performers
62% SATA 1TB 7k class

I personally prefer Option 2 because we saw that the specially on the highest performance needs only small portions of the capacity was handled on some managed disks. This means the extent size is too big and the real hotspots are small. We also could see that SVC cache was not a real help for these disks – so best you can do with it – put these kinds hot spots to SSD.

Tags:  system_administrator storwize svc v7000 bvq efficieny management performance presentation storage_efficieny storage optimization