Friday, July 16, 2010

All The Benefits of Short Stroking Without The Calories

There were some interesting tweets that I mostly stayed away from today regarding the benefits of Compellent's Fast Track performance enhancement feature.  I'll let that particular dog be and await a clarification from the marketing folks at Compellent.  However, I do want to take the opportunity to talk about Fast Track and explain what it is - and what it is not (all in my humble opinion, of course).

Some background on short stroking.  Short stroking is a performance enhancement technique that improves disk IO response time by restricting data placement to the outer tracks of the disk drive platters. 

This technique has been around for a long time and it's pretty easy to do (format and partition only a fraction - say 30% - of the disk capacity).  The trade off, obviously, is that your storage cost will have increased.  You could partition the remainder of the disk and use that for data storage as well, but this could put you back into a wildly swinging actuator arm situation which is precisely what you're trying to get away from. 

Enter Fast Track.  As a feature of Compellent's Fluid Data Architecture it provides the benefits of having your read/write IO activity confined to the "sweet spot" of each and every disk in the system while placing less frequently accessed blocks in the disk tracks that would normally not be used in a traditional short stroking setup.  It's like cheating death.  OK, maybe not that good but it's certainly got benefits over plain old short stroking.

If you're familiar with Compellent's Data Progression feature, this is really just an extension of that block management mechanism.  Consider that the most actively accessed blocks are generally the newest.  So, if we assume that a freshly written block is likely to be read from again very soon it's a good bet that placing it in an outer track of a given disk with other active blocks will reduce actuator movement.  Likewise, a block or set of blocks that haven't been out on the dance floor for a few songs probably won't be asked to boogie anytime soon or at least not frequently - so we can push those to the back row with the other 80% of the population.  It may take a few milliseconds to retrieve those relatively inactive blocks but an occasional blip isn't likely to transfer to application performance problems.  And this block placement is analyzed and optimized during each Data Progression cycle, so unlike short stroking, you're not sticking stale data in the best disk real estate.

So, in reality, Fast Track is an optimization feature which provides an overall performance boost without sacrificing storage capacity.  Comparisons to short stroking help explain the benefits of Fast Track but it's really much more than that.  Obviously, short stroking still provides you with the best guaranteed performance since you're removing variables that we have to live with in a contentious shared storage world.  But that's a wholly different issue - I've never advocated shared storage (using any product, mind you) as a way to increase disk performance.  Fast Track delivers a legacy performance tweaking concept into the shared storage economy without increasing administration complexity.

4 comments:

  1. Very good writeup. One question, how often are blocks moved from inner to outer tracks (or outer to inner).

    @jrmckins

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  2. @jrmckins - thanks Jim. First, let me clarify that this is page or extent movement (2MB by default in Storage Center). The data placement optimization takes place every 24 hours during Data Progression.

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  3. We bought our first Compellent array about 18 months ago and elected not to use FastTrack. Just a few months ago we bought a second array and added FastTrack to both. I've found it to be a mixed blessing in regards to allocated disk space, especially on Tier 3 (SATA).

    Our SATA disk now use R10-DM (dual mirror)and R6-10. The dual-mirror space has FastTrack allocation and Standard allocation. This is only a problem because the dual-mirror actually uses 200% space for dual-redundancy so it would be possible to lose up to 2 SATA disks from the array and still not lose data. This is great from a safety perspective but the additional service level of disk (FastTrack) reserves it's own dual-mirror allocated space while the Standard reserves it's own. This is not an issue if you have enough disk space to accommodate.

    This point about allocation is valid with FC disk and RAID5 or RAID6 as well, but it's exacerbated with dual-mirror. I can't say this is a problem but in retrospect I would have bought more SATA disk. I would recommend keeping this in mind when planning storage needs for an array.

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  4. Steve, a couple of thoughts. You may have a valid reason for wanting to write into Tier 3 at RAID 10 but that is not necessarily something you have to do. Optionally you can create a storage profile for volumes writing directly to Tier3 to write at RAID 5 only. Ideally you're using the "Recommended" storage profile which would progress data from Tier 1 down to Tier 3 without hitting RAID 10 in Tier 3.

    Assuming that you bought Tier 3 for capacity only you should be fine without RAID 10.

    Second thing I'd like to ask is what you mean exactly by "reserves" for standard and fast? There's not a separate pool of storage for the fast tracks so I'm not sure how you'd have a capacity impact by using Fast Track. There is a page allocation for each RAID level and track "type" but standard tracks shouldn't be getting allocated unless you are using a storage profile that puts replays on RAID 10 storage.

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