Microsoft and Intel showcase Storage Spaces Direct with NVM Express at IDF ’15

First published on TECHNET on Mar 25, 2016
Note: this post originally appeared on https://aka.ms/clausjor by Claus Joergensen.

This week I am at Intel Developer Forum 2015 in San Francisco, where we are showing a performance demo of Storage Spaces Direct Technical Preview with Intel NVM Express disk devices.

Storage Spaces Direct enables you to use industry standard servers with local storage and build highly available and scalable software-defined storage for private clouds. One of the key advantages of Storage Spaces Direct is its ability to use NVMe disk devices, which are solid-state disk devices attached through PCI Express (PCIe) bus.

We teamed up with Intel to build out a demo rack for Intel Developer Forum 2015 with a very colorful front panel:



Fig 1: Colorful front panel

The demo rack consists of the following hardware:

• 16 Intel® Server System S2600WT (2U) nodes, each comprised of

• Intel® Server System R2224WTTYS-IDD (2U)

• Dual Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2699 v3 Processors


• 128GB Memory (16GB DDR4-2133 1.2V DR x4 RDIMM)


• Storage per Server
  
  
  
  • 4 – Intel® SSD DC P3700 Series (800 GB, 2.5” SFF)
  
  
  
  

• Boot Drive: 1 Intel® SSD DC S3710 Series (200 GB, 2.5” SFF)


• Network per server
  
  
  
  • 1 Chelsio® 10GbE iWARP RDMA Card (CHELT520CRG1P10)
  
  
  
  

• Intel® Ethernet Server Adapter X540-AT2 for management


• Top of Rack Switch- Cisco Nexus 5548UP

Fig 2: Front of rack



Fig 3: Back of rack

The demo rack uses a hyper-converged software configuration, where Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct are the same cluster. Each server is running Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3. Storage Spaces Direct configuration:

• Single pool

• 16 virtual disks


• 3-copy mirror


• ReFS on-disk file system


• CSVFS cluster file system


• Each server is running eight virtual machines (128 total) as load generators. Each virtual machine is configured with:
  
  
  
  • 8 virtual cores
  
  
  
  


• 7.5 GB memory


• Compute equivalent to Azure A4 sizing


• DISKSPD for load generation


• 8 threads per DISKSPD instance


• Queue Depth of 20 per thread


• We are showcasing the demo rack with a few different workload profiles: 100% 4K read, 90%/10% 4K read/write and 70%/30% 4K read/write. We are happy with the results given where we are in the development cycle.
  
  
  
  The performance demonstration at IDF ’15 captures where we are with Storage Spaces Direct Technical Preview and demonstrates great collaboration between Intel and Microsoft. We also identified several areas where we can improve our software stack, and are looking forward to sharing future results as we work towards addressing these on our Storage Spaces Direct journey.
  
  We recorded a few videos so you can see the performance demonstration even if you do not attend IDF '15.
  
  Introduction to Storage Spaces Direct
  
  100% 4K Read
  
  100% 4K Read with Storage Quality of Service (QoS)
  
  70%/30% 4K Read/Write with Storage Quality of Server (QoS)
  
  
  
  Cheers
  
  Claus
  
  Links and stuff:
  
  twitter: @ClausJor
  
  Storage Spaces Direct deployment guide: https://aka.ms/s2d-deploy
  
  Storage Spaces Direct feedback: s2d_feedback@microsoft.com