Had some fun today with a new feature in OnTap 8.1.1, Flash Pools. You basically create an aggregate with two different disk types, SSD and SAS or SATA. In doing this you create another pool of flash just for that specific aggregate. Very cool feature that will bring NetApp a long way in the proving grounds of being able to do spindle effective VDI solutions and other read intensive operations. One thing that also benefits from Flash Pools is the ability to write data to them. The normal Flash Cache does not allow for writes and only serves up reads. Continue on to see an Iometer screenshot.
The configuration for this achievement was:
- NetApp FAS6210
- 1x Flash Pool with 10x SSD, 11x 600GB SAS
- One 10G iSCSI connection
- Cisco UCS C-class server
Here’s a fun picture of the outcome:
What was the IOMETER worklod, and how big was the working set?
October 25, 2012 at 7:02 pmErick, the workload on this one was crap. Was only using a 512b w/ 100% read, 0% random. This was a physical disk test as well, so no filesystem existed on the LUN that I was using. I have some other pretty impressive workloads that I’ll be posting up though that are about 80k IOPS doing a 4k w/ 70% read, 100% random. I’m working on compiling another post that’s got the sysstat outputs as well.
October 30, 2012 at 3:43 pm