Storage ISV

From the good old days of DOS everyone knew the benefits compression. Back in those days disk capacity was scarce.

In those days, PC's had 40MB HDD capacity and  programs like Foxpro 2.6  and Windows 3.1 could not be accomodated on a single disk. One had to remove Windows 3.1 installation to make space for Foxpro. Soon came newer version of DOS with a program called “Stacker”. Stacker had the possibility to compress the disk space data and thus more space was available for applications.

Gone are the days of 40MB HDD's and soon the disk capacity increased.

In the current era of technology the data is growing tremendously. Organizations especially are facing the issues with structured and unstructured data.

IBM has a wide variety of storages available ranging from small and medium business to large enterprises with scalable capacity, and in order to give its clients more value from Storage a compression enabled storage was introduced. IBM first introduced Random Access Compression Engine (R.A.C.E) technology in the IBM Real-time Compression(RtC) appliances. IBM then integrated the same technology in IBM Storwize V7000 family in 2013.

RtC is seamlessly integrated with Storwize V7000 system software stack to compress data before writing it to disk resulting in up to 80% storage capacity savings depending on the type of data. It is effectively equal to five times more capacity out of the same physical capacity in your system. RtC allows you to compress data even before it is written to your disks and is completely transparent to the applications and at the same time maintaining data consistency. It is implemented without any changes to applications, hosts, fabric, network..etc..

Since its inception, many users started implementing RtC with their Storwize V7000. Even though RtC provided great disk space savings by compressing the data, implementation of RtC in first generation of Storwize V7000 came with performance penalty.  When enabled, RtC used significant processing power of the system causing performance bottlenecks and thus the benefit offered by RtC was dwarfed by these performance issues.

IBM addressed this issue in the next generation of Storwize V7000 system by making use of  hardware compression acceleration with Intel®QuickAssist Acceleration Technology, that provided dedicated processing power and greater throughput for compression.

With the new hardware compression acceleration and better hardware resources, the Storwize V7000 Gen 2 easily overcame the performance penalties seen with Storwize V7000 Gen 1 systems. The performance of Gen 2 compressed volumes exceeds the non compressed volumes of  Storwize Gen 1 systems.

In order to showcase the benefits of Gen 2, benchmarking was performed with VMware's VMMark tool and Oracle databases with OLTP workloads.

Following benefits were observed on Storwize V7000 Gen2 over V7000 Gen1 for Oracle benchmarks -

- 70+% compression ratio for Oracle database files.
- Three times faster response time
- Five times faster in virtual disk (vdisk) read latency
- Four times faster managed disk (mdisk) response time
- Three time less managed disk (MDisk) write operations (compression reduces back-end I/O load, making the system more efficient, thus delivering better performance)
- With a higher number of processors, second generation of Storwize V7000 system is seamlessly able to support I/O activity with compression enabled

Following benefits were observed on Storwize V7000 Gen2 over V7000 Gen1 for VMMark benchmarks -

-  Average 50% compression observed for Redhat and Windows virtual machines.
- e-Commerce workload shows 30% improvement in benchmarking scores
- e-Commerce workload shows 35 % less latency
- Mail server workload and Web application workload benchmarking scores were similar across both generations. However, lower processor utilization was observed on Gen2 even after running benchmarks over compressed volumes.

For more details, refer following ISV technical papers
 
Using IBM Storwize V7000 Real time compression feature with Oracle
http://www.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP102507

Benefits of IBM Storwize V7000 Real-time Compression feature with VMware vSphere 5.5
https://www.ibm.com/partnerworld/page/stg_ast_sto_wp-storwize-compression-vmware-vsphere

Disclaimer : The thoughts expressed above are collective thoughts of Shashank Shingornikar and Mandar Vaidya. They do not necessary represent that of their employer.