Applications that can benefit from HAWC

Typically, it is recommended to place GPFS metadata in a storage pool consisting of fast storage devices such as SSDs. Storing GPFS recovery logs in fast storage improves the performance of metadata-intensive workloads where the recovery log is heavily used and when GPFS is configured to replicate data.

With HAWC, storing the recovery log in fast storage has the added benefit that workloads that experience bursts of small and synchronous write requests (no matter if they are random or sequential) will also be hardened in the fast storage. Well-known applications that exhibit this type of write behavior include VMs, databases, and log generation.

Since the characteristics of fast storage vary greatly, users should evaluate their application workload with HAWC in their storage configuration to ensure a benefit is achieved. In general, however, speedups should be seen in any environment that either currently lacks fast storage or has very limited (and non-scalable) amounts of fast storage.